Shawn Vestal: Think right-to-carry laws have made you safer? Statistics show otherwise.

There is a belief that thrives among gun romantics: Adding firearms to any situation increases people’s safety.

As if all that’s needed to thwart violent crime is more cowboys carrying pistols at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

At this point – in a country with as many guns as people, a continual stream of shooting deaths and a barrage of gun accidents among children – one might expect to have seen some revision of this view.

Instead, it lives on, factually undead. You hear it in the most extraordinary cases. After mall shootings: Why weren’t more people carrying at Cinnabon? After elementary school shootings: First-grade teachers should be armed! After campus massacres: Get those hungover sophomores some Glocks!

Meanwhile, Washington and Idaho are taking different legal paths. Idaho just scrapped all permitting required to carry a concealed weapon. Washingtonians successfully passed universal background checks, though other sensible gun-control measures continue to run into legislative opposition from supporters of laissez-faire gun ownership.

A new analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the rates of violent crimes in states after they adopted right-to-carry concealed handgun laws. Researchers modeled crime rates based on what had come before the RTC expansions – in essence creating “synthetic” versions of the states without the changes.

Guess what they didn’t find? That more guns reduced crime.

Quite the opposite.

“The extensive array of panel data and synthetic controls estimates of the impact of RTC laws that we present uniformly undermine the ‘More Guns, Less Crime’ hypothesis,” wrote the authors, led by Stanford law professor John Donohue.

“There is not even the slightest hint in the data that RTC laws reduce violent crime. Indeed, the weight of the evidence from the panel data estimates as well as the synthetic controls analysis best supports the view that the adoption of RTC laws substantially raises overall violent crime in the ten years after adoption.”

More guns, more crime. The new paper goes further than any other in ascribing a direct link between RTC laws and crime, and is likely to be controversial. If it holds up, it will represent a complete about-face on the issue – at least in terms of the science, if not popular assumptions.

Two decades ago, the gun lobby’s favorite researcher, John Lott, produced “More Guns, Less Crime,” a comparison of RTC laws and crime rates that claimed to show gun ownership drove down violence. The study was almost immediately followed with great skepticism; the journal that published it reanalyzed the data a year later and concluded there was no basis for the claim, and Lott has gone on to become a figure of controversy in the scientific community.

And yet Lott, and his thesis, is still cited constantly by gun absolutists.

In the immediate wake of “More Guns, Less Crime,” studies concluded that it was not possible to detect any link between RTC laws and crime rates, one way or the other. Then, as more time passed and data accumulated, studies began to show associations between RTC laws and crime – suggestions of a link that required more rigorous study. Other studies have shown that stricter permitting for gun purchases reduces death rates from violent crime and limits the migration of guns into the hands of criminals.

The current paper looked at 2000-14, and compared crime rates in 11 states that adopted RTC laws during that time frame. The researchers claim it is the strongest evaluation yet, but only time, and further research, will tell. They are drawing unequivocal conclusions, though.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives is pondering a bill to make it easier to buy silencers, and the NRA is losing its mind. Without a black Democrat in the White House to drive gun sales to record heights, sales have dropped and gun makers – whom the NRA represents best – find themselves turning to ever more desperate fearmongering. Last week, it released a scare video of maximum sleaziness, casting protesters, Trump opponents, the media and anyone else not on the crazy train as engaged in a kind of “violence of lies” that gun owners must resist with force.

It was an appalling display of dangerous, anti-social extremism – urging America’s Archie Bunkers to arm themselves for political argument.

What could go wrong? Buncha armed “good” guys, furious at “bad” ones?

The National Bureau of Economic Research report suggests an answer. First, it acknowledges that guns have defensive purpose, and that violent crime rates, in all states, have gone down. But it modeled violent crime rates in four separate analyses, comparing rates in states that expanded right-to-carry laws against historical patterns.

They concluded that rates of nonviolent crimes were 13 percent to 15 percent higher in the 10 years after the laws were adopted than they would have been without the RTC expansion. Researchers wrote, “our analysis suggests that had states avoided adoption of RTC laws, they would have experienced greater drops in violent crime. Indeed … while RTC states have now fallen below their violent crime rates of 1977 by about 9 or 10 percent, the states that did not adopt RTC laws enjoyed violent crime drops from the late 1970s of over 40 percent.”

The researchers offer some possible explanations. One is that, believe it or not, permit-holding gun owners sometimes commit crimes with those guns.

“George Zimmerman, the popcorn killer at a Florida movie theater who was angry at a father texting a babysitter, and the angry gas station killer (shooting a black teen for playing loud rap music) are all individuals who would likely never have killed anyone had they not had an RTC permit,” they wrote.

Another reason is that gun carrying ramps up conflict in any situation, and the practice attracts people – like angry young men, in particular – drawn to aggression, researchers wrote. And still another reason, and one that is crucial in our political debate over the way guns are sold, checked and tracked, is this: “individuals who carry guns around are a constant source of arming criminals” through theft.

“For a whole array of reasons,” Donohue told the Atlantic, “more concealed-gun-carrying outside the home pushes up violent crime.”