Dragonmans gun store range
(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

From the Second Amendment Foundation . . .

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership—a project of the Second Amendment Foundation—has released a new study showing there is “no association between increased lawful firearm sales and rates of crime or homicide.”

The study, by DRGO member Mark Hamill, MD, FACS, FCCM, is titled “Legal Firearm Sales at State Level and Rates of Violent Crime, Property Crime, and Homicides” and is published in the Journal of Surgical Research. Dr. Hamill worked with a team of nine other doctors to reach their conclusions.

Dr. Robert Young, Executive Editor of DRGO, says “This confirms what those of us already know who follow all the research by medical, criminology and economic experts,” said DRGO Executive Director Dr. Robert Young. “Lawful gun possession is in no way related to homicide or other crime rates, and the constant drumbeat of anti-gun researchers and activists is a house built on sand.”

“DRGO is an important project of the Second Amendment Foundation,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “because anti-gun billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg are funding research that tries to portray guns and gun ownership as a disease.”

The new report is based on a detailed, objective 50-state analysis of data from the National Instant Background Check System, the Department of Justice Uniform Crime Reporting program, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System covering the years 1999-2015.

Dr. Hamill is an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Nebraska, a longtime gun owner and a law enforcement officer in his previous career. His experience, expertise and thoroughness makes his team’s findings unimpeachable. In 2019, he published earlier research, “State Level Firearm Concealed-Carry Legislation and Rates of Homicide and Other Violent Crime” in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. In this, he and his co-authors do the same careful work analyzing 30 years of data state-by-state. 

“The take-home from these two studies is that neither lawful gun ownership nor concealed carry regimes can be correlated with rates of homicide or other crime,” Dr. Young said.

Read more at DRGO: “Dr. Hamill vs. the Empire (Again)” and in Hamill et al‘s two papers.

24 COMMENTS

  1. Anti-gun radicals would like to say that because gun sales increase that so does crime, but they can’t find any correlation between the two such as a most of the guns purchased were used in a crime. The fact is 99.9999% of legal gun owners do not commit a crime let alone with a gun.
    Here is a naked truth. The anti-gun radicals are trying to inflame the debate with unrelated information.

    • Sounds a bit like what I have been saying for quite a while…

      1) The Second Amendment is one thing.

      2) The criminal misuse of firearms, bricks, bats, knives, vehicles, etc. is another thing.

      3) History Confirms Gun Control in any shape, matter or form is a racist and nazi based Thing.

      • “The criminal misuse of firearms, bricks, bats, knives, vehicles, etc. is another thing.”

        per FBI data … 80 – 85% of firearm homicides are criminals shooting other criminals, police shooting criminals, or law abiding people shooting criminals in valid legal defense. common factor = criminals

        A favorite trick of anti-gun (including the anti-gun dacian) is to point to ‘homicide rates’ and say “see, the problem is guns, look at all the murders. if we just get rid of guns the murder rate would go down.” or something similar, but its not true anyway. The murder rate would not go down, in fact it would increase or stay the same and the reason is the violent criminal element numbers are increasing and ~88 of those violent criminals don’t use firearms to commit their violent crimes. All they would do is simply use a weapon that is not a firearm, violent criminals want to commit violence plain and simple and the lack of a firearm is not going to deter them from committing violent crime and that’s going to include murder.

        The argument is “well, look at the U.K., they banned guns and the gun violence rate went down with their gun ban, well not really and I explained why here > https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/dont-scapegoat-lawful-gun-owners-for-seattles-failed-polices-and-leadership/#comment-6226557

        Also, ‘homicide’ doesn’t always mean murder. It a broad term that also includes ‘justified homicides’ under which are justified police shootings and ordinary law abiding citizen valid legal defense by DGU. So to point to homicide stats for the U.S. and say or imply they are all murder is a lie.

        In reply to the rest of your statement …

        ~1,300 (actually its increased to ~1,700 now but hasn’t stabilized there yet so I’ll stick with the stable point of ~1,300 for now) criminal knife attacks upon victims daily across the United States.

        ~3,500 (actually this has increased also to ~4,000 but hasn’t stabilized there yet so I’ll stick with the stable point of ~3,500 for now) criminal attacks upon victims daily across the United States by use of non-firearm ‘weapons’ (excluding knives) for example, hands/feet, bricks/rocks, bats, ligatures, vehicles, other ‘improvised weapons’ such as screw drivers or even #2 pencils and pens (just for schools alone last year there were ~ 38,000 such criminal attacks in school building or on school grounds against students and staff during school hours where ‘schools’ includes college campus also).

        ~12 % of criminals committing a violent crime use a firearm, ~2% of that ~12% use a ‘long gun’ (e.g. rifle, shotgun). ~88% of criminals committing a violent crime do not use a firearm but instead uses other weapons (see above)

  2. “Study Finds No Association Between Increased Legal Firearm Sales and Crime Rates’ > every study that has actually included ALL the relevant factors data has found the same thing.

    But… wasn’t this a TTAG article (different wording now) a few weeks ago under a different title?

  3. It’s all about pulling our teeth so we don’t bite their balls off when they try to go full communist.

  4. Violent crime peaked about 20 years ago, (more or less). At that time, there were approx. 100 million less guns in the USA than there are now.

    Here we are in the present, with a violent crime rate roughly one-half as high as it was then, with 100-odd million *more* guns ‘on the street’, it becomes clear – More guns mean less violent crime.

    It’s so clear, even a Leftist Scum ™ could see it (if they were intellectually-honest, and we know they aren’t)… 🙂

  5. Should have been plenty obvious when we were experiencing twenty years of consistently increasing gun sales and consistently decreasing crime.

    The anti’s will just ignore that two decades, shift focus, shuffle some terms around and work reality like clay until they can get the outcome that fits the agenda.

    Like changing “crime” for “shootings” and zeroing in on “children” which so happens to include the peak gangster years of 15-21 and negating twenty years of calm by adding the last 10 years of increasing violence, all lefty fueled by the way, and setting the start date as the expiration of the federal AWB.

    Now you get “since those evil Republicans killed HRH Bidens AWB shootings among children have only increased” and that’s the headline that gets repeated on ABCCBSNCC every night and the talking point of every banner politician at the podium.

    • “Should have been plenty obvious when we were experiencing twenty years of consistently increasing gun sales and consistently decreasing crime.”

      It’s a very “Inconvenient Truth” they would like to ignore…

    • If I tell you the same story long enough and from enough sources, you are statistically likely to believe it’s true.

      If I start doing that when you’re a small child the chances you don’t believe it are very, very slim.

      This being the case, in any group of people, consistently lying via multiple outlets and doing so in the same direction is a powerful tool to control how people think.

      Now, if I’m a real dick, I start to talk about how the people who don’t believe the lie are crazy. Over time I’ll morph that into how bad they are and then into how they’re actually dangerous. In the end, I’ll slide slowly into “they’re terrorists” geography before finally declaring them a serious threat that needs to be dealt with.

      Soon the majority wants concentration camps for the dangerous undesirables. This is what China’s “Zero Covid” policy is all about. Normalizing extra-judicial detainment, soon to be permanent detainment.

      Just another form of Die Juden haben das Fleckfieber!!”.

    • Of course they concern themselves with reality.

      You have to know reality in order to purvey the inverse of reality to people.

  6. Beat this drum all you want. Until you realize that pattern recognition is the thing being gamed, and how it is being gamed, you’re going to lose ground consistently.

    Facts might not care about feelings but feelings care about facts just as much. Until you overcome that hurdle and work on this from a different angle your studies will only preach to the choir.

  7. Sign at my Grandkids school says “Teachers and Staff Are Armed and Committed To Protecting The Students.” It’s a Rural Consolidated School, and the community leans Right. The County Sheriff or a Deputy generally stops by the school at least once a day at various times of the school day.
    How many other schools have enacted similar policies? Not enough by a long shot. The thing is after a shooting there’s the clamor for more laws, yet none of these laws have stopped a single shooting. McSniffy likes to brag about “his Assault Weapon Ban” stopped school shootins, yet the Columbine Shooting occurred right in the middle of the Ban, so his claim is a Lie.
    The point is this, the one thing we’ve failed to do is Hardening our Schools. Locked Doors and Resource Officers have only worked in a few cases, and have failed miserably in others, so with that track record, Locked Doors and a Resource Officer isn’t good enough. Training and arming Teachers and Staff is being tried, and so far, TTBOMK, there hasn’t been an incident at any of the schools trying it.
    The whole idea of Gun Free Zones is asinine, divorced from reality and ignores the fact that those with evil intent don’t care if it’s a Gun Free Zone. in fact, it’s better for them because their intended victims can’t fight back.
    FJB, and FTDemonazicrats

  8. Those stats were proven back in the ’80’s when Florida legalized CCW and open carry. John Lott was the pioneer in researching the correlation between states with relaxed gun laws and crime. The more guns legally owned and carried, the less violent crime. And the number of bad guys shot committing crimes increased. I like that ratio instead of innocent people being the victims. Arizona had similar results when they allowed open carry. It just proves that guns aren’t the ‘problem’. It is the people who use them illegally. ‘Gun control’ in just another tactic used by Communists to control ‘We the People’. Molon labe!

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