Most popular words appearing in the names of gun stores (2003-2025).

Hey, #econsky if you are interested in guns, check out our new paper (with @chadtopaz.bsky.social ) The big result is that America's gun habits are predictable & stable. Culture > crime spikes. Who knew math could make firearms feel so... flat? shorturl.at/DPo5s

One of these days, I want to write a paper with someone where we use the same data and have a friendly disagreement about the interpretation of the results. Let the reader decide who is right and who is wrong.

Our cat seems to bring in more friends than she takes out. Saved this fella and (accidentally) scared some kids.

This seems strange. www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/p...

wouldn’t go this far but the tech certainly has issues. DC makes their data easily accessible. easy to see that fireworks still cause problems.

No Kings Lees’s Summit. Complete lawlessnes.

"The Trump Administration is working to reopen the government for the American people. Mission-critical activities of CDC will continue during the Democrat-led government shutdown. "

Applying some of what I learned from @chadtopaz.bsky.social . Gun dealers isn't the only thing that is low dimensional. Concealed carry permits are well. Which is a little remarkable considering the heterogeneity in state laws and renewal cycles.

Guys. 7 with 4 preps across 3 different addresses is a bit much.

real footage of me working with brightspace

I honestly can't get over how terrible Brightspace is. I miss blackboard so much.

You can do the same exercise with actual gun sales! year fixed effects are even more similar across the two outcome variables (gun sales and estimated gun sales).

@troach.bsky.social and I's shitck is changes in gun sales are national vibes, & refs at some of the leading economic journals don't seem to buy it. There is a natural test though: estimate logged county-level CC permits using fixed effects panel and only year fixed effects.

~36% of the guns recovered in DC from November 2021 to August 2025 were Glocks.

Watching Time Cop on Netflix. Whew. Movie goes hard.

Just submitted the proofs for my job market paper from 2015. Whew, what a journey.

I ”jokingly“ suggested to my wife we put this guy out. After she found out about Kimmel, she became very open to it.

Gave up resisting it and updated the academic website. sites.google.com/view/davidbl...

Got a comment that the accuracy of our gun sales estimates is just due to population (e.g., pop grows -> sales grow). Big nope there. Correlation between standardized gun sales estimates per capita and NICS gun checks per capita is about .8.

What planet am I on?!? www.mediaite.com/politics/pro...

Brightspace is terrible. Option hell on test questions. Teaching 6 (or 7, depending on how you count reserves) different classes this semester (4 different preps) so creating material is a huge time sink.

If you standardize (within state) our new gun estimates and compare them to standardized Google searches with the word gun, you get this.

Just updated @troach.bsky.social and I's gun sales estimates using 2020-2023 data. The estimates are really good. The raw correlation using NICS checks explicitly for a gun and data from 2004 - 2023 is .85. Green line 45 degree line; red is ols

First, NBER and now the Gun Violence Research Collaborative? Am I the only one who finds it surprising and important that, outside rare events, the monthly variation in gun interest and background checks is nearly identical across states?

The similarity of monthly NICS checks across states is amazing. Even the 12-month differences are on top of each other.

Monthly gun homicides in the US.

Another awesome paper I was lucky to be a part of.

Had an interesting idea: loop through each state and estimate standardized monthly murders (from the FBI) using different lags/leads of standardized monthly gun interest (google searches) and for each state (so 50 * 160 regressions).

I try to hide my redneck side but can’t suppress the nature boy in me. Daughter also lets out the twang.

Look at this guy throwing gang signs

I was very happy to have an extremely small role on this paper and learned a ton from @chadtopaz.bsky.social . It is amazing how synchronized the markets are too. E.g., if I know the permitting trends in one state, I have a pretty good idea of the trends in another.

Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos got me thinking that we could probably test if there was a relationship between US handgun manufacturing and Mexican Homicides. Never expected it to be this obvious.

Am I imagining things or does the yearly total of Mexican and US homicides look more like US handgun manufacturing than either country's homicide counts in isolation?

Updated version. US handgun manufacturing and the Mexican Homicide Rate 1949-2020

With the SCOTUS case today, I thought this would be relevant.

Average handgun prices across states. The big problem is that it is all based on online data. So you get large error bars in states with small populations (and/or low internet access?).

Boxplot of gun prices. Data is collected using a web crawler I wrote. Modest number of observations (6k). Hopefully will be able to expand on it. I have area codes too which means that a panel could be feasible.

big part of my upcoming presentation is that gun sales are mostly driven by animal spirits. Here is how various AIs drew that. The first two are my favorites but took a little more prompting.

So the CBP data and SAIPE data is back up. Don’t be scared to call out data going missing.

Very excited to present @troach.bsky.social and I’s work this spring! law.utexas.edu/calendar/202...

Gravity model of imported crime guns (gun trafficking possibly) is working out better than I expected. The effect of gun laws in a different state on the number of guns recovered in your state approaches zero with distance. Same with population.

Wth is county business pattern data missing? 403 error. At any rate, I have it here: osf.io/tuamj/

I wish I had gotten there earlier.

Kids are doing a lockdown today. I hate that this has to be a thing.

I always do my data merging and creation twice. Once for initial analysis and once before I start sharing. Usually I don’t find any mistakes but when I do I get excited because it normally means better estimates.

We live in the ✨ world of tomorrow ✨

I am pretty much certain you could use a gravity model to analyze why guns flow from one state to another. It would probably be even simpler than a standard trade model.