Introduction The issue of the right to bear firearms in the United States is relevant. It is the subject of controversy among many American jurists and political scientists. The main disputes are between supporters of tightening the rules for issuing licenses for carrying firearms and those who consider carrying a weapon as a natural right of every American. Extreme ideologization not only explores the political debate on arms control but also affects scientific research on possible changes in the rules for issuing weapons licenses for crimes and their consequences. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how empirical research in the USA evaluates the effectiveness of county legislation on the licensing of arms through its influence on the level of violent crime. Methods A principal place in assessing the effectiveness of laws belongs to empirical and legal research. A feature of empirical jurisprudence is that it allows people to look at the work of the law, not only from a legal but also from a theoretical and methodological point of view. Empirical and legal studies enable the analysis of rules from the economic theory of law, as well as using tools of a whole range of disciplines, such as sociology, statistics, mathematics, etc. Using these tools, the empirical sociology of law can predict the possible consequences of taking another bill. It can also give an opinion on the effectiveness of already adopted legal norms. The problem In the USA at the state level, several models of the legal regulation of the issuance of licenses for carrying weapons have developed. Thus, until the end of the 1980s, in many states, the issue model existed when local authorities made decisions for granting a license at the county level. As a rule, it was received by district sheriffs who had full discretion in issuing permits to carry weapons in the territories entrusted to them (Goodman & Perry, 2018). However, in 1987 the court of Florida ruled that district sheriffs could no longer restrict the right to carry weapons of those citizens who seemed unreliable to them. From now on, local authorities were obliged to make their decisions on the issuance of licenses, guided by a set of formally defined rules. In other words, local authorities were required to issue a license if a person has no outstanding criminal record or mental disabilities. There were also some more formal criteria based on which the citizen’s right to bear arms could be limited. (Miller, 2019). The Florida model, which greatly simplified the process of obtaining permission to carry weapons for citizens, was called shall-issue and was subsequently adopted by more than half of the states. Statistical studies of the gun-control in American criminology do not give an unambiguous answer to the question of how the availability of weapons for the population affects the criminal situation in a particular state. Among American scientists and politicians, there are supporters of different points of view. Some of them concluded that liberalization of the rules for issuing licenses (and, as a result, an increase in the turnover of weapons) helps to reduce crime. Others believe that the result, on the contrary, is an increase in the