By Dean Weingarten
Texas is one of the few states that actually tracks crimes committed by concealed carry weapon permit holders. In Texas, the permit is called a concealed handgun license, or CHL. The Texas Department of Public Safety has filed annual reports of the convictions of CHL holders from 1996 through 2011. They wait two years to obtain final conviction information and compile all the data before publishing their totals. As you might expect, the number of CHL holders who commit murder or manslaughter is remarkably low. According to the DPS reports, the number of murder and manslaughter convictions for CHL holders has totaled 30 over the 16 years they’ve compiled the numbers . . .
DPS also reports on the number of active CHL holders for each year. Those numbers were totalled to obtain the number of CHL holder-years. The total number of CHL holder-years for 1996-2011 is 4,295,429. The two numbers give us the ratio of CHL holder convictions for murder and manslaughter per 100,000 CHL holders per year. That number is .70/100,000.
Yes, the decimal point is in the correct place. The rate of murder and manslaughter for the general population of Texas averaged for the years 1996-2011 is 6.0/100,000. You can compare that to national numbers here. What was that about the wild west?
©2013 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.