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This chapter examines the social implications of concealed carry policies, including the process for obtaining a CHL in Texas. One of the key features of that training is the development of situational awareness—the practice of being alert to potential danger in public places. While carrying a firearm in public is often explained as a no-cost self-defence strategy, this analysis suggests that CHL training might heighten feelings of risk while also making license holders feel more prepared. One of the most significant social costs of CHLs as a response to violent crime, including mass shootings, is that they focus a disproportionate amount of attention on people who are least likely to be victims of crime while ignoring the effects of violent crime on the communities that need the most help. In this way, CHLs impede the pursuit of social justice, suggesting a need to reimagine the “good guy.”

The paradigm of the armed and dangerous mass killer in public opinion and legislation is a homicidal-suicidal stranger hunting in public. Yet half of all firearms-related homicides take place in the home, typically among intimates and people known to the slain. Drawing on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, this chapter shows that even in the context of extraordinary violence by the homicidal-suicidal, the major early red flags and risk factors involve seemingly ordinary smaller-scale assaults and domestic disturbances. Firearms laws prevent individuals convicted of crimes of domestic violence or under court-issued restraining orders from possessing firearms. The problem is that many perpetrators never come to the attention of a court. Based on these findings regarding what current legal screens miss, this chapter discusses how police discretion and scene-of the-assault procedure for “ordinary” domestic violence can help prevent escalation to the feared extraordinary violence of homicidal-suicidal mass killings.

This chapter lays out the basic arguments offered by those who support concealed handgun policies, including the threat of mass shootings and other violent crimes, and it details the background debates that emerged in Texas when CHLs were first introduced. Licensing rates over time are analysed, and data on gun ownership and attitudes toward gun policies are discussed. The NRA’s impact on gun culture is examined through an analysis of how the organization constructs threats from above in the form of government overreach and threats from below via crime. It also includes a description of theoretical frameworks related to race, class, gender, and fear of crime that are used in the analysis and of the research methods employed.