Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 22:30:54 -0700
From: Tavares@ALUM.MIT.EDU ("C. D. Tavares")
Subject: Re: Best counter arguments
To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
At 8:57 PM -0700 5/17/01, you wrote:
> A newspaper columnist in Missouri has written a column in which she
> attempts to refute pro-gun claims.
> (http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/printer.pat,opinion/3accad9e.516,.html)
>
> I'd appreciate it if somebody could point me to the best refutations of
> her
> suspicious statistics. Here's the relevant xcerpt from her article:
>
>
> Claim: Concealed-carry proponents claim: In states where there is a
> conceal-carry law, crime has gone down significantly.
>
> Fact: According to a 1999 study by the Center to Prevent Handgun
> Violence
> (based on FBI figures), between 1992 and 1997, in states that
> did not
> have conceal-and-carry laws, the violent crime rate fell an
> average of 24.8 percent.
>
> In the 29 states studied and that have broad-reaching conceal-
> carry laws, the violent crime rate dropped by only 11.4 %.
> Nationally, during that same period, the violent crime rate
> fell 19.4 percent.
>
> There was a greater reduction in crime in states without
> conceal-carry laws.
Date: 01/22/99 10:16
Received: 01/2/99 10:32
From: John R. Lott, Jr., john_lott@law.uchicago.edu
To: Edgar Suter, edgar.suter@dipr.org
Letters to the Editor
Newsweek Magazine
Dear Sir:
Newsweek erred in relying on Handgun Control as an unbiased source for a
recent chart relating concealed handgun laws to changes in crime ("Is He
the Smoking Gun?" Business, Jan. 25). Handgun Control not only
mischaracterizes state laws, but their classifications are inconsistent
with their own recent claims elsewhere. More importantly, their simple
comparison of the change in crime rates between 1992 and 1997 based upon
laws during 1997 makes no sense. About a third of the states enacted the
laws in late 1995 or 1996 and thus did not have the concealed handgun law
during most of the period.
The relevant question is whether crime rates decline after concealed
handgun laws are passed and how changes in crime rates are related to
changes in the issuance of permits. Using FBI crime statistics for all
American counties by year from 1977 to 1994, my research has found that
allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns deters criminals
and reduces violent crime, with murder rates falling by at least 10%.
These are drops relative to he national changes in crime and after law
enforcement, demographics, and other gun control laws are accounted for.
Sincerely,
John Lott
> Claim: Carrying a gun will provide self-defense.
>
> Fact: According to the National Institutes of Justice, on average,
> 16% of all police officers killed in the line of duty are
> killed with their own firearm that was taken from them by the
> assailant, despite their rigorous training. The International
> Brotherhood of Police Officers and the International
> Association of Chiefs of Police oppose passage of liberal
> conceal and carry laws.
To the brainless, this statistic might even sound significant. But it has
nothing to do with the efficacy of civilian self-defense.
First of all, the percentage of cops killed in the line of duty who were
killed with their own guns says nothing about the success rate of guns as a
self-defense tool for police officers.
Suppose 50,000 police officers nationwide successfull apprehend a million
criminals in a year, and successfully defend themselves against those
criminals 400,000 times with their firearms (with or without firing).
Now, suppose ten of those officers died in the line of duty. Two of them
were ambushed and shot with their own guns. Wow, the brainless see that as
a 20% failure rate. Actually, it's a failure rate of two out of a 400,000.
Secondly, the police and civilian experience are entirely different.
Police officers are tasked with PURSUING and APPREHENDING dangerous felons.
You aren't. You are free to run from an attacker if you can, or you can
defend yourself if you can't. The police officer can't run. The officer
has to go in after him and take him -- or them, as the case may be --
preferably alive. And the police officer goes "looking for trouble" by
chasing down (on their own turf) dangerous felons who are not, at the
moment, attacking him, or anybody else.
Carrying a firearm is not a GUARANTEE of successful self-defense. There is
no such guarantee. It does, however, improve your chances tremendously.
Kleck found in Point Blank that:
Robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were
less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used
any other methods of self-protection or who did not resist at all.
Only 17.4% of gun resisters in robberies, and 12.1% in assaults, were
injured. The misleading consequences of lumping gun resistance in
with other forms of forceful resistance (ala Yeager et al. 1976; Cook
1986) are made clear by these data, since other forms of forceful
self-protection are far more risky than resisting with a gun. After
gun resistance, the victim course of action least likely to be
associated with injury is doing nothing at all, i.e., not resisting.
However this strategy is also the worst at preventing completion of
the crime. Further, passivity is not a completely safe course either
since a quarter of the victims who did not resist were injured anyway.
This may be because some robbers use violence preemptvely, as a way
of deterring or heading off victim resistance before it occurs. Thus
they may use violence instrumentally to assure victim compliance,
against those victims for wwhom this seems to be a safe course of
action (Conklin 1972, Chapter 6). Other robbers may simply enjoy
assaulting victims for its own sake, using violence expressively (Cook
and Nagin 1979, pp. 36-7).
> Claim: Only law-abiding citizens will be allowed to get permits and
> when they do, they will act responsibly and won't likely commit
> crimes.
>
> Fact: A study done in March 1999 by the Violence Policy Center, based
> on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, shows that
> after Texas passed a liberal conceal-and-carry law, nearly
> 1,000 permit holders have been arrested for crimes that include
> murder, kidnapping, rape or sexual assault, and drug charges.
> The study further found that permit holders were arrested for
> weapons offenses at a rate more than twice that of the general
> population.
Total shit. Lott tears this study an entire new asshole at
http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/OpEdArcv/License%20to%20Kill.htm
Joe Rickershauser adds:
Nowhere in the report will you see what the rates for any of these crimes
are among the non-CCW population. They don't mention this comparison,
because the general population IS MUCH WORSE.
The report is based on arrest counts, not convictions, which is done to
inflate the numbers.
I suspect that multiple charges against a single idividual/incident are
each counted for their display.
Of their seven "fleshed out" examples, which must be the worst they could
come up with in the three year period, _none_ concern the fear that is
always placed on the table about CCW carriers. They are either at home
crimes, or crimes that were pre planned--crimes that would have happened
even if the people didn't have CCW.
--
Tavares@alum.mit.edu | http://home.earthlink.net/~cdtavares | RKBA!
The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom.
--ROBERT HEINLEIN