Concealed Carry Up 215%, Murder Rate Down 14%

[Amp]

Concealed carry permits rose 215 percent between 2007 and 2015, and the murder rate dropped 14 percent during that same time period.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/24/concealed-carry-215-percent/

[Totem Polar]

It's a start.

[BehindBlueI's]

Correlation is not causation.

Nor is the trend universal.

Not to poop on the parade, but let's keep our side of the debate honest.

[Kukuforguns]

Correlation is not causation.

Nor is the trend universal.

Not to poop on the parade, but let's keep our side of the debate honest.

A disproportionately high percentage of people with high cholesterol take statins. This does not mean that statins cause high cholesterol.

Read John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime for an education on how hard it is to establish causation with respect to this issue.

[GardoneVT]

Correlation is not causation.

Nor is the trend universal.

Not to poop on the parade, but let's keep our side of the debate honest.

Agreed.

A practical example: note that because one has a CCW permit does not mean they carry. Lots of gun owners and family members hold CCWs because of fewer restrictions when going to the range or hunting.

[BehindBlueI's]

A disproportionately high percentage of people with high cholesterol take statins. This does not mean that statins cause high cholesterol.

Read John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime for an education on how hard it is to establish causation with respect to this issue.

Yup, read it many years ago. I still agree with him that the people who are most likely to be targeted by crime are also the least likely to have a carry permit.

[Kukuforguns]

Yup, read it many years ago. I still agree with him that the people who are most likely to be targeted by crime are also the least likely to have a carry permit.
My comment was meant to support yours. I wasn't suggesting you read Lott's book.

Have you read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2RWQHM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding ?

It tries to explain why some of the most likely victims are unlikely to carry.

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[BehindBlueI's]

My comment was meant to support yours. I wasn't suggesting you read Lott's book.

Have you read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2RWQHM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding ?

It tries to explain why some of the most likely victims are unlikely to carry.

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

I haven't, thanks for the recommendation.

[ReverendMeat]

Correlation is not causation.

Nor is the trend universal.

Not to poop on the parade, but let's keep our side of the debate honest.

I don't think anyone was claiming causation. The negative correlation is still enough to demonstrate untruthfulness in common anti-gun arguments.

[BehindBlueI's]

I don't think anyone was claiming causation. The negative correlation is still enough to demonstrate untruthfulness in common anti-gun arguments.

Then it is relevant when permits issued goes up in my county but murders also go up?

There's a ton of variables. The tiny effect, even per Lott, of licenses issued is easily overwhelmed by a multitude of others.

[ReverendMeat]

Yes, it's relevant depending on what claim you're trying to make and if regression analysis shows significance.

[Hambo]

I hated stats and my teacher but I can tell you that you can't use the raw murder rate numbers to tell anything meaningful. Permits are irrelevant when it's gang revenge and drug ripoffs, and there are other categories that have nothing to do with guns preventing murder.

[DallasBronco]

I hated stats and my teacher but I can tell you that you can't use the raw murder rate numbers to tell anything meaningful. Permits are irrelevant when it's gang revenge and drug ripoffs, and there are other categories that have nothing to do with guns preventing murder.
The problem is that the anti-gunners will still use those types of crimes as proof that we need gun control when it would have no impact to reduce those types of crimes.

[Hambo]

The problem is that the anti-gunners will still use those types of crimes as proof that we need gun control when it would have no impact to reduce those types of crimes.

Then we refute that. We're not going to convince hard core anti-gun people of anything. We're trying to convince people who haven't made up their mind or are open to the truth. If all we give them is a choice of lies we win nothing.

[45dotACP]

Concealed carry going up should logically mean shootings will go up right?

Sure the lefties will still hate it, but if all the good guys are carrying and don't shoot any of the bad guys, why carry a gun at all?

I don't carry to decrease the number of shooting deaths...I carry to decrease the chances of me being the dead one.

Which is why even if only one shooting death happened all year, I would still carry.

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[BehindBlueI's]

The problem is that the anti-gunners will still use those types of crimes as proof that we need gun control when it would have no impact to reduce those types of crimes.

Then we refute them with truth, not with cherry picked data and a pocket full of dreams.

Here's the number of aggravated assaults, falling from a high point in 1991:
1991 1,911,767
1992 1,932,274
1993 1,926,017
1994 1,857,670
1995 1,798,792
1996 1,688,540
1997 1,636,096
1998 1,533,887
1999 1,426,044
2000 1,425,486
2001 1,439,480
2002 1,423,677
2003 1,383,676
2004 1,360,088
2005 1,390,745
2006 1,435,123
2007 1,422,970
2008 1,394,461
2009 1,325,896
2010 1,251,248
2011 1,206,031
2012 1,217,067
2013 1,199,684
2014 1,197,987

and murders:

1991 24,703
1992 23,760
1993 24,526
1994 23,326
1995 21,606
1996 19,645
1997 18,208
1998 16,974
1999 15,522
2000 15,586
2001 16,037
2002 16,229
2003 16,528
2004 16,148
2005 16,740
2006 17,309
2007 17,128
2008 16,465
2009 15,399
2010 14,722
2011 14,661
2012 14,866
2013 14,319
2014 14,249

So did the level of permits start rising in 1991? I doubt it, since many "shall issue" or "may issue" states today were "no issue" in the 1990s.

Note the drops from 1994-2004. "Proof" the Clinton AWB worked? Even though violent crime was already falling?

[GardoneVT]

Concealed carry going up should logically mean shootings will go up right?

Sure the lefties will still hate it, but if all the good guys are carrying and don't shoot any of the bad guys, why carry a gun at all?


Not necessarily. Research and experience shows some CCW involved defensive incidents end once Mr Thug realizes his victim has a weapon. The risk of getting shot vs the reward of a stickup or carjacking means they take off to easier prey.

In these events there may not even be a police response logged - Mr Thug won't necessarily call the cops,and the citizen may decide not to since no crime was technically committed.. Which means tracking these non-incidents in crime data would be difficult.

Then there's isolating the folks who carry occasionally to regular concealed carriers,followed by people with permits who hold them for strictly logistical reasons . I knew an anti-gun college professor that held a current carry permit despite having zero desire to even own a gun- she has it as her husband carried a revolver for protection ,and if he left the gun in a shared vehicle she could be jailed for unlawful carry as state law mandates a gun be locked and unloaded in the trunk without a CCW.

Then there's folk who wouldn't ever carry yet have it because they can skip the 4473 paperwork as well as local waiting periods. All these folks would have to be isolated from the national total before determining whether or not their packing a gun acted as a criminal deterrent .

[Kukuforguns]

Not necessarily. Research and experience shows some CCW involved defensive incidents end once Mr Thug realizes his victim has a weapon. The risk of getting shot vs the reward of a stickup or carjacking means they take off to easier prey.

In these events there may not even be a police response logged - Mr Thug won't necessarily call the cops,and the citizen may decide not to since no crime was technically committed.. Which means tracking these non-incidents in crime data would be difficult.

Then there's isolating the folks who carry occasionally to regular concealed carriers,followed by people with permits who hold them for strictly logistical reasons . I knew an anti-gun college professor that held a current carry permit despite having zero desire to even own a gun- she has it as her husband carried a revolver for protection ,and if he left the gun in a shared vehicle she could be jailed for unlawful carry as state law mandates a gun be locked and unloaded in the trunk without a CCW.

Then there's folk who wouldn't ever carry yet have it because they can skip the 4473 paperwork as well as local waiting periods. All these folks would have to be isolated from the national total before determining whether or not their packing a gun acted as a criminal deterrent .
Don't forget that number of licenses is not the same as number of licensees. Lots of people on this forum have multiple licenses.

[DMF13]

Correlation is not causation.

Nor is the trend universal.

Not to poop on the parade, but let's keep our side of the debate honest.
A disproportionately high percentage of people with high cholesterol take statins. This does not mean that statins cause high cholesterol.

Read John Lott's More Guns, Less Crime for an education on how hard it is to establish causation with respect to this issue.
If you want to keep our side of the debate honest you will need to find a better source than John Lott, aka Mary Rosh, and "More Guns, Less Crime."

http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/the-mystery-of-mary-rosh
. . . consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime. In 1999 the sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan questioned Lott's claim that "if national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 60 percent. Lott replied that "national surveys" actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott's conclusions in More Guns, didn't exist. . .

. . . Meanwhile, several of the bloggers who had been writing about the controversy -- a group that included me -- drew the ire of someone called Mary Rosh. Rosh, who identified herself as a former student of Lott's who had long admired his fairness and rigor, said that it was irresponsible to post links to the survey debate without calling Lott first. This sounded odd, not only because bloggers very seldom do that kind of background research before posting a link, but because Lott had made precisely the same criticism several times in e-mails to bloggers covering the story.

A Google search revealed that Rosh had for several years been a prolific contributor to Usenet forums, where she regularly and vociferously defended the work of Lott. On a whim, I compared the I.P. address on Rosh's comment to the one on an e-mail Lott had sent me from his home. They were the same.

I posted all of this, and to his credit Lott confessed. "The MaRyRoSh pen name account," he explained, "was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons."

The news spread quickly, and the second round of distributed investigation began. Bloggers unearthed old posts by "Rosh" and linked to them on their sites. Among the gems: "[Lott] was the best professor that I ever had....Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material." Many were troubled by Rosh's apparent attempt to get an online interlocutor, who claimed to have anonymously peer-reviewed one of Lott's papers, to reveal his identity. (Lott later told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he was merely trying to force his opponent to confess that he had lied about being an academic.) . . .

[Glenn E. Meyer]

As state before, both sides try to imply causality from regression analyses. Dumb. I heard a progun research claim that gun lock laws increased rapes as when the laws went in, rapes went up. I was discussing this with Don Kates once. I commented has the researcher looked at the rapes to see if any of the increased rapes involved situations where there was a nonaccessible gun. Nope - just baloney.

Similarly, the NY Times consistently denounces concealed carry as there have been 900 crimes over several years from concealed carry folks - as compared to the very large number of crimes with guns by criminals, folks without permits and compared to 15,000,000 permit holders, compared to the crimes by police officers (sorry), etc.

It is the use of vivid instances to increase estimates of occurrence (a cognitive flaw documented by Kahneman and Tversky years ago).

What else is new?

[Kukuforguns]

If you want to keep our side of the debate honest you will need to find a better source than John Lott, aka Mary Rosh, and "More Guns, Less Crime."

http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/the-mystery-of-mary-rosh
. . . consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime. In 1999 the sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan questioned Lott's claim that "if national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack."

The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 60 percent. Lott replied that "national surveys" actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott's conclusions in More Guns, didn't exist. . .

. . . Meanwhile, several of the bloggers who had been writing about the controversy -- a group that included me -- drew the ire of someone called Mary Rosh. Rosh, who identified herself as a former student of Lott's who had long admired his fairness and rigor, said that it was irresponsible to post links to the survey debate without calling Lott first. This sounded odd, not only because bloggers very seldom do that kind of background research before posting a link, but because Lott had made precisely the same criticism several times in e-mails to bloggers covering the story.

A Google search revealed that Rosh had for several years been a prolific contributor to Usenet forums, where she regularly and vociferously defended the work of Lott. On a whim, I compared the I.P. address on Rosh's comment to the one on an e-mail Lott had sent me from his home. They were the same.

I posted all of this, and to his credit Lott confessed. "The MaRyRoSh pen name account," he explained, "was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons."

The news spread quickly, and the second round of distributed investigation began. Bloggers unearthed old posts by "Rosh" and linked to them on their sites. Among the gems: "[Lott] was the best professor that I ever had....Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material." Many were troubled by Rosh's apparent attempt to get an online interlocutor, who claimed to have anonymously peer-reviewed one of Lott's papers, to reveal his identity. (Lott later told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he was merely trying to force his opponent to confess that he had lied about being an academic.) . . .
I am aware that Lott is a controversial figure. I carefully stated that his book should be read to provide background on how hard it is to establish causation. His book is an excellent source to investigate how complex this issue is.

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[Drang]

I am aware that Lott is a controversial figure. I carefully stated that his book should be read to provide background on how hard it is to establish causation. His book is an excellent source to investigate how complex this issue is.
How does it go, argue the facts, if the facts don't support you argue the person...?

[DMF13]

How does it go, argue the facts, if the facts don't support you argue the person...?In this case the person lies about the facts. It's a problem with both. :rolleyes:

He's not just "controversial," he's a liar, and just as disgraceful/dishonest as Michael Bellesiles. Most importantly he lies about the very issues relevant to the gun control topic, and commits fraud to shore up those lies. It's not like he's known for being honest in his work, but lying to his wife about playing poker with friends rather than working late.

For those that are looking for real information, his information is completely worthless, as nothing he says can be trusted. However, some people still want to refer to him merely because they like his message, regardless of the total lack of credibility.

[Ed L]

Not necessarily. Research and experience shows some CCW involved defensive incidents end once Mr Thug realizes his victim has a weapon. The risk of getting shot vs the reward of a stickup or carjacking means they take off to easier prey.

In these events there may not even be a police response logged - Mr Thug won't necessarily call the cops,and the citizen may decide not to since no crime was technically committed.. Which means tracking these non-incidents in crime data would be difficult.

This is a very good point and makes it hard to judge exactly how many defensive gun uses take place.

Someone better at Google than I can probably do a better job of finding a more recent number. The best I could find was this 20 year old document from the Department of Justice that places the the DGUS at 108,000. Go to page 8 of the following document:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf.

However, as GardoneVT states, this probably omits a lot of DGUs because they go unreported.

I had trouble with the Lott numbers even aside from the question of their legitimacy of his research. I don't think his surveyed number can be extrapolated against the US at large, since you have many populous states, NY, NJ, CA, that have lower rates of gun ownership and restrictive carry laws and in places like NJ, NYC, and MA, restrictive laws on the possession of firearms.

So I think the Lott estimate of 2.5 million DGUs is unrealistically high. This would mean that there are more than twice as many DGUs as there were violent crimes in the US--an estimated 1,163,146 in 2013 according to the FBI Uniformed Crime Statistics: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final. Then again, these crime estimates may themselves be low.