The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions (CGVS) recently released its Public Carry Permitting Guide.
It’s the latest in a series. Previous titles include: Extreme Risk Protection Orders (March 2024), Safe Storage (March 2025), and Firearm Purchaser Licensing (July 2025).
From the outset, the reader should be aware that while the CGVS’ mailing address may be in Baltimore, its physical address is clearly somewhere in the Twilight Zone.
In its latest release, the CGVS claims when states relax carry laws, they experience increased ‘gun violence’.
To solve this, the CGVS says we must clamp down on the permissive trend in American carry laws.The group proposes 15 areas for improvement (I.e., much more restrictive).
Channeling their inner Rod Serlings, the Baltimore Bloomborgs are unfazed by the fact the U.S. average annual murder rate since 2003, when Alaska joined Vermont as the second permitless carry state, was 30% lower than the previous average dating back to 1960.
The CGVS acknowledges Bruen but ignores it by including some measures the Supreme Court has already ruled unconstitutional.
The Public Carry Permitting Guide has other fundamental flaws.
First problem: ‘Gun violence’ encompasses all firearm-related injuries and deaths. This includes murder, non-negligent manslaughter, justifiable homicide, negligent manslaughter, self-harm (suicide), unintentional/accidental discharges, and aggravated assault.
However, the CGVS’ topic is carrying a gun, so suicides and accidents aren’t implicated. This eliminates the majority of firearm-related fatalities and levels the playing field. Michael Bloomberg and his adherents will vigorously protest the exclusion of suicides because they are the only type of firearm-related death that is increasing.
Next, suicides are not evenly distributed across the U.S. In the District of Columbia, for example, more than 90% of gun-related deaths in 2024 were homicides; in New Hampshire, 88% of gun deaths are suicides.
[Since the CDC is reluctant to estimate the number of non-fatal gunshots, we’re using homicides as our yardstick.]
Another critical factor is demographics, specifically race, ethnicity, and gender. I am sure any number of gun-grabbers will be clutching their pearls, but it’s impossible to fix a problem when you won’t be honest enough to face it.
In 2024, the homicide victimization rate for White, non-Hispanic, urban males ages 13-29 was 2.89 per 100,000 of the demographic population. We changed just one parameter, race, and the rate soared to 71.94 per 100,000. Black, non-Hispanic, urban males, ages 13-29, accounted for just 1.4% of the U.S. population. They were the victims of more than 22% of all gun-related homicides.
In the introduction, the Permitting Guide says:
“Historically, states made it difficult to legally carry a gun in public. Public carry of firearms was either entirely prohibited or only allowed after a rigorous permit application process.”
CGVS says the sources for this statement are Mark Frasseto and Saul Cornell. Frassetto is the Deputy Director of Second Amendment History and Scholarship at Everytown Law; Cornell holds the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University.
Cornell may be familiar to some; he’s developed quite following among gun-grabbers by claiming the Second Amendment protects only a collective right connected to militia service.
Farsetto and Cornell are way off base. What appeared during the 19th Century was legislative interest in regulating concealed carry of firearms and other weapons, such as Bowie knives. In the post-Civil War period, carry restrictions were most often aimed at the newly emancipated slaves, Native Americans, and other racial/ethnic groups.
Many states allowed permitless open carry or never regulated open carry at all.
The history of Texas provides some insight. From the founding of the Republic in 1835 until the Reconstruction Era, the Texas Constitution said pretty much the same thing: “Every citizen shall have the right to keep and bear arms, in the lawful defence of himself or the State.”
However, in the Constitution of 1869, there was a change: “Every person shall have the right to keep and bear arms, in the lawful defence of himself or the State, under such regulations as the Legislature may prescribe.”
As often happens when politicians gain a little more power, the Texas Legislature wasted no time.
On April 12, 1871, the Texas Legislature passed An Act to Regulate the Keeping and Bearing of Deadly Weapons, better known as the Act of April 12, 1871.
“Section 1: Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Texas, That any person carrying on or about his person, saddle, or in his saddle bags, any pistol, dirk, dagger, slung-shot, sword-cane, spear, brass-knuckles, bowie-knife, or any other kind of knife manufactured or sold for the purposes of offense or defense, unless he has reasonable grounds for fearing an unlawful attack on his person, and that such ground of attack shall be immediate and pressing; or unless having or carrying the same on or about his person for the lawful defense of the State, as a militiaman in actual service, or as a peace officer or policeman, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof shall, for the first offense, be punished by fine of not less than twenty-five nor more than one hundred dollars, and shall forfeit to the county the weapon or weapons so found on or about his person; and for every subsequent offense may, in addition to such fine and forfeiture, be imprisoned in the county jail for a term not exceeding sixty days.”
Other than the exemptions for military service, law enforcement, and a vague carve-out for travelers, the only other exception was in Section 4:
“This act shall not apply to, nor be enforced in any county of the State, which may be designated, in a proclamation of the Governor, as a frontier county, and liable to incursions of hostile Indians.”
This was the strongest prohibition on handgun carry in the United States. No licenses, no exceptions for natural disasters, border disputes with Mexico, bands of outlaws, or those carrying large sums of money or other valuables.
Penalties for violations increased until UCA (Unlawful Carrying of Arms) was classed as a Class A misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of a year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine for the first offense.
It was a gun-grabber’s ultimate fantasy.
Rifles and shotguns weren’t even mentioned in Texas carry laws. Then, as now, you could walk down the middle of Congress Avenue in Austin toting any long gun.
The 1871 statute remained in effect for 124 years. On May 26, 1995, Governor George W. Bush signed Senate Bill 60, authorizing the first handgun carry permit in the history of the Lone Star State.
Even though the carry ban was passed more than a year after Texas ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, it was a racist Black Code law.
My maternal grandmother was born in Luling, Texas, in 1889. Somewhere in the 1909-1912 time period, she was photographed before attending a social. She was chaperoned by her older brothers, one of whom had what appears to be a Colt Army Special or New Service revolver stuck in his waistband.
I asked if he wasn’t concerned about an encounter with law enforcement. “That law was just for Mexicans and Indians,” she told me.
The mass shooting at the Luby’s Cafeteria in 1991, which left 23 dead and 27 wounded, was one of the major factors in the end of the prohibition. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a survivor who lost both of her parents in the massacre, had a handgun locked in her car in accordance with the Texas carry ban.
There aren’t any guarantees in situations like this, but had that revolver been in her purse, she could have intervened.
She spent four years lobbying to get carry reform through the Texas Legislature. Ann Richards, Texas’ last Democratic governor, fiercely opposed the change and promised to veto any carry permit law. She even refused to allow the Legislature to hold a voter referendum.
Richards was joined by the usual doomsayers predicting a bloodbath. The Texas Police Chiefs Association said licensees should have at least the same level of firearm training required for law enforcement officers.
Democrats controlled the House and Senate but bipartisan majorities in both chambers sent Senate Bill 60 to George W. Bush, Texas’ first Republican governor since the Reconstruction.
The Texas Department of Public Safety began accepting Concealed Handgun License applications on January 1, 1996.
Did blood run in the streets of Waxahachie? High-noon showdowns in Abilene?
No. In fact, the 1996 murder rate was 15% lower than the 1995 rate.
Comparing the average murder rate from ten years before the change to the first ten years after shows the rate plunged 48 percent and there were nearly 8.000 fewer murders.
The last vestige of the 1871 statute were swept away 150 years after it passed. On June 16, 2021, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1927 and Texas became a constitutional carry state. From 2022 to 2025, the violent crime rate dropped 21 percent and the murder rate plunged 34 percent.
The CGVS Public Carry Permitting Guide is cherry-picking and manipulation on an Olympian scale; there aren’t enough Pinocchios in the world to do it justice.
We already know gun control addicts have no shame but Johns Hopkins University should be very embarrassed.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
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