Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Alabama), November 4, 2017
When it comes to the nation-wide arms race, Alabama is in the lead.
A study completed by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the numbers of people in the country having concealed weapons permits rose by 1.83 million in 2016, to a total of 16.3 million permit holders. That’s a stunning 256 percent increase over the 2007 numbers.
And Alabama has the highest rate of any state for permits being issued, with 20 percent of the adult population in Alabama holding permits, according to the report. Indiana comes in second with 15.8 percent.
Mitch Gaines, of Autauga County, has a concealed weapons permit, commonly called a pistol permit or license in Alabama.
“It’s a right that I have, the right the bear arms,” he said. “If I’m going to carry a pistol, I want to do it legally.” . . .
According to the CPRC there are 14 states in the country that allow permit-less or so called “constitutional” carry, where people are not required to get pistol permits.
“Some people in these states choose to obtain permits so that they can carry in other states that have reciprocity agreements with their states,” writes John. R. Lott Jr., of the center. “However, because of these constitutional carry states, the nationwide growth in permits does not paint a full picture of the overall increase in concealed carry.” . . .
St Augustine Record, October 26, 2017;
But did Australia’s gun buyback program reduce violent gun crime?
No, according to John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center. “Their firearms homicide rate,” said Lott, “had been falling for a decade prior to the buyback. It continued falling at the same rate after the buyback.
There was no sudden drop, just a fairly constant decline that continued even as gun ownership rose back up to previous levels. The armed robbery rate rose in the first five years after the buyback. After another 10 years, the rate had fallen to pre-buyback levels.” . . .
Washington Post, October 17, 2017
Gun-rights advocate and author of “The War on Guns,” John R. Lott Jr., makes a similar point when calling out politicians for claiming tough gun-control policies are effective. The problem with using individual states, he says, is that there are many factors that contribute to gun violence.
“If you look at only one place (one experiment), it is simply impossible to control for many factors that can affect crime rates,” he said in an emailed statement.
A better approach, Lott says, analyzes rates of gun violence in multiple places before and after gun-control policy is enacted.
. . . .
Snopes, October 18, 2017
On 20 September 2016, researchers at the Crime Prevention Research Center released a study in which they addressed the following question: Do white police officers disproportionately target black people? The study noted that very limited data is available about the race of officers who are involved in custody deaths. While one data set in which the race is known seemed to show black police officers are more likely to kill black people across the board, the study’s authors noted a number of factors could skew that result. Most important, in the vast majority of cases, the race of the officer who caused the death was not known.
The most salacious aspect of the study was predictably pulled out and turned into inflammatory headlines, such as this one from the blog Western Journalism: “This Blows The Lid Off MASSIVE Black Lives Matter Lie — They Didn’t See This Truth Train Coming.” But as experts on the issue note, a consistent impediment to drawing conclusions about the issue of police shootings continues to be a data void. This problem was noted in the following study:
We have data on a total of 2,699 fatal police killings for the years 2013 to 2015. This is 1,333 more killings by police than is provided by the FBI data on justifiable police homicides. When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect. For the estimates where we know the race of the officer who killed the suspect, the ratio of the rate that blacks are killed by black versus white officers is large — ranging from 3 to 5 times larger. However, because the media may under report the officer’s race when black officers are involved, other results that account for the fact that a disproportionate number of the unknown race officers may be more reliable.
One of the authors, John Lott Jr., said that researchers collected data on the officers’ race through media reports, by matching available names with police department photographs or through Freedom of Information Act requests. Lott told us that “The bottom line, at the very least is, white officers aren’t shooting black suspects at a higher rate than other officers are.” . . .
Washington Post, October 17, 2017; Hartford Courant, October 17, 2017; Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, October 17, 2017; Columbus Dispatch, October 21, 2017; Martinsville Bulletin (Virginia), October 17, 2017
“We can try to control for income, poverty, law enforcement, demographics, etc., but there are other differences with culture and other factors that we can’t measure very well,” he said. . . .
The Federalist, October 19, 2017
There’s just one problem: the data does not support her statement. Dr. John Lott has studied this extensively. His book “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws” (3rd edition, 2010, University of Chicago Press) makes this point in great detail. His methodology and data are available on the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) website. One example is what happens to the murder rate after gun restrictions are imposed. Here are the results from Chicago and Washington DC. . . .
Elko Daily Free Press, November 1, 2017; Mesquite Local News, November 2, 2017
Lott pointed out that the better metric is to look at what happens in states after they change their gun background check laws. He said his research found a 2 percent increase in firearm murders after laws requiring background checks on private transfers were enacted. . . .
Portsmouth Patch, Friday, October 27, 2017
But it never came. Peaking in the early 1990s, homicide, rape, robbery, and assaults all began a rapid decline. A criminologist named John Lott published More Guns, Less Crime in 1998, arguing that states with permissive concealed-carry laws saw the most significant drops in violent crime. . . .
Suddenly the anti-gun crowd had a new argument: Concealed carry has no impact on crime! Lott was left chuckling as he pointed out the irony of groups like the Brady Campaign launching an all-out assault on his findings and concluding that more people carrying guns had no effect on crime rates. Who would have thought?
The public, however, wasn’t buying it.
Quite the opposite. In 2003 “shall issue” was the law in thirty-four states, and Alaska joined Vermont: Residents of The Last Frontier could now carry a concealed handgun without first obtaining a license – referred to by proponents as “constitutional carry” – and over the next ten years the state’s murder rate would drop by twenty percent.
By 2010 the number of “shall issue” states stood at thirty-six, and Arizona joined the ranks of “constitutional carry” states, followed by Wyoming in 2011, Arkansas in 2013, and Kansas and Maine in 2015. The Crime Prevention Research Center would report in May 2017 that over fifteen million Americans had a concealed-carry license – not including those people living in the fourteen states (!) that had changed their carry laws and now require no license at all. Only seven states retain “May issue” concealed-carry laws: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. . . .
Ammoland, October 26, 2017
Ammoland, November 3, 2017
The Crime Prevention Research Center reports that at least 20 states have allowed citizens to carry firearms in the capitols for some time. Some states allow open carry of firearms by citizens even if they do not have a permit, such as Kentucky. Others may require that only permit holders can carry in their capitols. . . .
Guns.com, October 30, 2017
NRA-ILA, November 2, 2017
And it isn’t just Illinois. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott shows that high prices for concealed-carry permit issuance are part of the larger gun control scheme in many states. In fact, in the liberal bastion of California, “fees can be as high as $385 for just two years” and “in New York City … a three-year permit costs $430.” In addition to these fees, the mandated cost of training in California “can run from $250 to more than $1,000.”
Via such fee structures, the ruling class literally makes the exercise of the Second Amendment cost-prohibitive.
Adding insult to injury, in the “states of California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island, as well as the District of Columbia, people have to demonstrate need for a permit to a local public official.” In other words, even if a person can round up the money to buy a gun and pay the training and permit fees, he or she must still demonstrate a need to carry a gun, or the application for a concealed-carry permit will be rejected.
Lott’s piece explains how such a permitting system not only deprives the poor of the ability to exercise Second Amendment-protected rights, but deprives minorities of the ability as well:
Los Angeles County illustrates how this discretion results in only a select few wealthy and powerful individuals getting permits. If Los Angeles County authorized permits at the same rate as the rest of the country, it would have around 600,000 permit holders. Instead, only 226 permits have been issued within a population of about 7.9 million adults, and many of them have gone to politically connected individuals, including judges. Indeed, former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca earned a reputation for awarding permits to people who gave him campaign donations or generous gifts.
While women make up 36 percent of permit holders nationally, they only got 7 percent of the permits in Los Angeles County. Although almost half the county’s population is Hispanic, only 6.5 percent of permits were given to Hispanics. Few were given to blacks.
Never forget, these rules and regulations do not prevent the ruling class from enjoying the benefits of guns for even a second. And they don’t stop them from spending millions in taxpayer dollars to protect their own lives via good guys with guns.
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