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John Lott reckons more guns equals less crime. FBI crime stats reveal less crime. Gun sales stats reveal more guns. It could be one of those “correlation doesn’t equal causation” deals. Yes but—concealed carry should have an inhibitory effect on crime at some point, shouldn’t it? Case study: Lee County Florida has issued 30,908 concealed weapons permits. The County has 620,151 residents. Assuming one gun, one permit, one concealed weapon, 4.98 percent of the population are tooled-up. (In practical terms it’s probably less than half that). edr.state.fl.us reports that Lee County’s violent crime rate sank 16.6% year-on-year. Murder stats dropped 26.3%. At what point, with what evidence, can gun control advocates argue that the mere existence of armed civilians deters violent crime? I know! Common sense!
(30,908/620,151) x 100 = 4.984% of Lee County Florida residents have concealed carry permits, not 20% as stated in the article above.
Hit the refresh button.
Robert’s slight of hand at work. I saw your comment after I posted mine pointing out the same thing, and then your comment disappeared. He’s a quick little rascal he is.
Agreed.
You may recall a previous admission that I correct stupid mistakes ASAP and then remove the comment pointing it/them out so I don’t appear like a total idiot. Like that.
Robert, no harm, no foul.
“…armed civilians deters violent crime? I know! Common sense!”
You may be surprised how often this falls on deaf ears…for some reason antigunners seem to not have common sense, ignore logic, and shun accountability/responsibility of any sort. As you’ve written before, they like to stick their fingers in their ears, scream “LA LA LA LA, Can’t hear you!”…sorta like arguing with a 6 year old, just dont do it.
Crime drops a lot after a perp gets popped. The lack of a trial, lenient sentence, and innumerable second chances tends to get through to even the stupidest criminal.
“But guns cause more crime because think about the children. Especially with all of those shoulder things that go up, America is doomed. It’s common sense, republitards.”
– Your average gun grabber
What we can say is that more guns does not result in blood in the streets, a jump in the homicide rate, a jump in death rates, and so forth. If guns were as bad as the control freaks wish us to believe, we’d all be dead.
This is another of those “I wish I had an answer computer” moments. I want to know how many people in the state of Florida who have gotten their CWFL actually carry on a daily basis. Or even 5 days out of every 7.
Gun control advocates will never look at the numbers because their argument was never founded on numbers. The gun control movement was founded on emotion.
You cannot beat emotional arguments with logic, nor statistics.
Actually, it was founded on racism, and moved on to emotion when racism became unfashionable.
True, true.
I should say that the recent incarnation of gun control is based on emotion (since, oh, the mid-70’s and the founding of Handgun Control, Inc.).
how many people actually carry daily is unimportant. the bg faces a crapshoot choice, risk a shootout with a range qualified citizen or pick a less risky type of crime to commit.a lot of bg’s are packing guns that they haven’t even fired, put’s them at a disadvantage.
I live in a town of about 13,000 in a very anti gun state.
Last year, when I renewed my carry permit, I got to chatting with the officer. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned about 1100 people in town had carry permits.
8% in a very blue state. Imagine that.
More abortions = less criminals = less crime.
Fixed.
One of the studies done in Freakonomics came to the same conclusion.
correlation does not equal causation
“Yes but—concealed carry should have an inhibitory effect on crime at some point, shouldn’t it?”
Yes, but shouldn’t someone be able to show that. It should be a simple task(maybe?) for a statistician to factor, baseline, or control for the non-firearms issues surrounding this. Then come up with a provable thesis.
Until, or if it has been done and peer-reviewed published. It is still just conjecture.
the line between common sense and hope is a very thin line.
It cannot be denied that concealed carry has deterred crime at the exact instant when the concealed gun was revealed to or fired at the criminal. There are too many proven cases for this to be considered conjectural.
I don’t carry to deter all crime or to change the crime rate. My goal is less grandiose. I carry to deter or prevent a crime against me. Period.
Good point. Unless you DGU dispatches or causes the apprehension of the BG he will just move on to the next target. By the way do you think some thug disposed of Mikey? He has disappeared.
I hope for your sake that you didn’t just jinx it by mentioning his name…
We traded mikey for hummer and two tr0lls to be named later.
@Ralph: Sounds like we made out like bandits on that deal.
I have lived in Lee county my whole life (I admit thats not too long, I’m only 20) though I’m away at college now. I have always felt that Lee county gets it when it comes to guns and individual rights. We have a great sheriff who I believe is very easy and fair when it comes to signing off on paperwork for NFA stuff. Great county with some awesome gun stores and good choice of ranges too boot. Nice to see it get some reppin’ in.
Also, the thing about the crime is pretty significant because Lee county (mainly made up by the cities of Ft. Myers and Cape Coral) are not all that peaceful and quiet. Quite a lot of gang crime and drugs in the area, so a decrease like that is pretty significant.