An expert draws 7 lessons about US gun laws from the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the Rittenhouse verdict
As the country awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a New York state case that may create a federal constitutional right to carry guns outside the home, what lessons can the nation draw from the recent acquittal in Wisconsin of Kyle Rittenhouse and the convictions in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia?
The obvious first lesson is that no one would be dead, maimed or going to prison if the men in these cases had not possessed firearms or had just left their weapons at home. The man Rittenhouse maimed learned that his self-proclaimed constant gun carrying not only did not protect him or others, but simply added him to the victim count when he pointed his gun at Rittenhouse.
During the oral argument in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen on Nov. 3, 2021, a number of the conservative Supreme Court justices seemed unaware of a second lesson: The best empirical evidence shows that carrying guns outside the home substantially elevates the risk to the public. As my own research and 14 academic papers in the past four years alone have shown, the restrictions on gun carrying in states like New York and California have reduced violent crime. Expanding the Second Amendment beyond its current scope of a right to possess a gun in the home would likely reverse this progress.