David Johnson
@davidblakejohnson.bsky.social
94 followers 160 following 150 posts
Stay at home dad moonlighting as an associate professor of economics. Mostly interested in gun policy and fishing.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
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.
I honestly can't get over how terrible Brightspace is. I miss blackboard so much.
Halfway serious question: Can we call leaders "Authoritarian Christian Nationalists" without getting into trouble? Or does it need to be "Christian Nationalist with Authoritarian leanings"?
btw, when the outcome variable is logged gun sales, a panel regression (county fixed effect) with only year fixed effects has an r^2 of over .9. the within unit r^2 is also near .6.
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).
Oh! The R^2 for a model estimating logged cc permits at the county level using ONLY year and county fixed effects is.....

R-squared = 0.9356
Adj R-squared = 0.9313
Within R-sq. = 0.6761
ta-da!

Almost parallel!

Which makes perfect sense because not every permit is going to come with a new gun
Not great but not bad either. Blows up a little later in the panel ☹

But here is a thought: a lot of these CC permits are going to be renewals. So what if I also control for the number of permits issued 5 years in the past (common permit length)?
Then do the same with our logged gun sales estimates.

If we are right, then both models should produce similar year fixed effects.

Here is what happens when I try it:
@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.
I think it is that but also law enforcement. I have a paper that looks at it in detail, FWIIW. Heavily influenced by the Kansas City Gun Experiment.
Watching Time Cop on Netflix. Whew. Movie goes hard.
August and September are generally pretty average in terms of accidents (February is the low).

Hasn’t been this low since COVID.
Also a big drop in traffic accidents.
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.
Use the wayback machine to see how much of the tariff you had to eat! should be easy to find historical prices.
Sadly, I think you are right. Everyone can grasp it, so it ends up sucking all the air out of the room. Lowest common denominator.
This isn’t a new thing. I have paper that used stormfront as a group. Part of the experiment asked students how much the agreed with stormfront’s motto/description. I was taken aback by how much agreement/support there was among undergraduates.