The Good Guy With A Gun Theory, Debunked

I already know how this is going to end, but...

The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked

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At the heart of this campaign for the hearts, minds, and holsters of America has been an article of faith that the NRA and its allies have preached since at least the 1990s: that people enhance public safety by carrying guns to defend themselves. Economist John Lott first developed this "More Guns, Less Crime" theory in his 1998 book of the same title, and has since popularized it via frequent legislative testimony and op-eds. The NRA has deployed Lott's work to beat back calls for new curbs on guns and their use. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when NRA leader Wayne LaPierre made his infamous assertion that the "only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he was tapping into the already well-seeded notion that hidden guns at arm's reach of their private owners increase public safety. It's a powerful, seductive idea, particularly to Americans who favor personal liberty over communitarian ideals. It's also completely wrong, according to a new analysis of nearly 40 years' worth of crime data.

Here are a couple more relevant quotes from the article, which you should totally go read:

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"For years, the question has been, is there any public safety benefit to right to carry laws? That is now settled," said paper's lead author, John Donohue. "The answer is no."

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Since lowering the bar for concealed-carry licenses gradually leads more people to get those licenses (Florida alone has nearly 1.8 million people permitted to carry concealed guns, and Pennsylvania and Texas each have around one million), and because more guns in public is supposed to reduce crimes, then we should expect states to see less crime as "Shall Issue" laws kick in. The Stanford team found precisely the opposite: "Ten years after the adoption of RTC laws," they write, "violent crime is estimated to be 13-15 percent higher than it would have been without the RTC law."

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The problem with drawing a connection between the rise of concealed carry and the drop in the national crime rate, as Donohue and his co-authors point out, is that crime has not fallen equally in all parts of the country. Instead, the decline in violent crime has been most pronounced in states that maintained strict control over the right to carry guns, like New York and California. When other states decided to make it easier for residents to pack firearms, they appear to have missed out on reductions in crime of the same magnitude. Yes, in raw terms, crime declined in those right-to-carry states as well—but not nearly as much as it could have.

The upshot of this last point is that while violent crime statistics have been falling all over America, it has fallen more slowly in states that have "Shall Issue" laws.

Since this is a comprehensive and rigorous study, backed by forty years' worth of crime data, I expect that those members on this forum who have previously repeated the NRA's propaganda that gun ownership reduces crime to change their minds, completely recant this idea, and start arguing for greater gun control, now that we have hard scientific evidence to support it.

*beat*

Hahaha. Who am I kidding? Of course they won't.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2sYzuhT