Reply With QuoteCC probably does impact on certain crime categories but take NY city where CC is not at all that common and there has been a clear decline in many crime stats.
MILLER: Gun ownership up, crime down
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...up-crime-down/
"Gun-control advocates are noticeably silent when crime rates decline. Their multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts are designed to manufacture mass anxiety that every gun owner is a potential killer. The statistics show otherwise.
Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that violent crime decreased 4 percent in 2011. The number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults all went down, continuing a pattern.
“This is not a one-year anomaly, but a steady decline in the FBI’s violent-crime rates,” said Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association. “It would be disingenuous for anyone to not credit increased self-defense laws to account for this decline.”
CC probably does impact on certain crime categories but take NY city where CC is not at all that common and there has been a clear decline in many crime stats.
If a criminal has a choice of unarmed victims vs armed, guess what they will choose? Not rocket science here folks.
That is credited to Bloomberg's aggressive community policing programs. Concealed carry is only one solution. There are many others.Originally Posted by Mr Gently Benevolent
We also have stop and Frisk which is being hailed as racist. 7,201 guns recovered in 2009 alone using it. and we have one of the most restrictive laws about owning handguns in the USA
Clearly those guns laws work.
And on the same hand you have kids who play with legally owned guns and end up hurting themselves, students who shoot up their schools with legally owned guns, fathers who kills their families with legally owned guns...
But it matters not. Occasional abuse does not warrant the restriction of a basic right so long as the restriction is not definitely going to prevent further abuse.
I'm as pro-2nd Amendment as you get, but correlation does not equal causation. Long term trends, and I'm talking over 30 years, show a decline in crime stats. And not just in the US. Demographics are the real driver. And aging population is a less criminal population. That's the real fact of the matter.
That is certainly a major cause, but to dismiss concealed carry as an additional cause is unwarranted. Florida was the first state to adopt 'shall issue', and there was an immediate drop in violent crime. There was also a very clear change in the pattern of violent crime. Armed robbers started hitting tourists coming out of the airport in Miami. They would look for cars with rental car stickers getting on the freeway from the airport on-ramps, and then bump them from behind. When the tourists stopped to exchange insurance info, they were robbed at gunpoint, and in a few cases, murdered. This led to rental car agencies removing company logo stickers from their rental car bumpers, and LEOs warning tourists not to stop if bumped on the freeway.
I just wanted to add that the term for older people being less apt to commit crimes is called "aging out".
That's my perspective as well. Guns don't cause crime anymore than they prevent it on a macro level (yes, I'm aware that in a specific case where an individual successfully stops a violent attack with his CCW, the gun "stopped" the crime -- and I'm all for that).
I tend to think that violent crime rates are pretty much independent of things like harsher sentencing guidelines, gun control laws (or a lack thereof), concealed carry, and even the hiring of more police officers. I believe that, in some specific areas, concealed carry can be credited (as can any of the other options), but to argue that, as a whole, violent crime rates are declining due to that specific factor is short-sighted, and probably an assertion made more to score political points than anything else.
The above aside, statistics like these ruining the Brady Bunch's arguments is good news to me.
So you think that people carrying concealed has no effect whatsoever on criminals deciding whether or not going out and robbing people at gunpoint might be a good idea?
Two years ago Gallup pole estimated that slightly over 1/3 of Americans own firearms. (117 Million)
Every year there are over 2,000,000 million cases where firearms are lawfully used in the defense of our citizens. In many cases, with a shot being fired it has prevent a crime from occurring. In bold for NeedsABetterName information. That is not a small number.
More at:
http://www.americanrifleman.org/Blog...x?cid=25&id=21
I see the 2M number frequently. My first question is where does this data come from? Hollis, your link appears to be a blog detailing various reports of self-defense use; I'm not seeing a study on the 2 million figure. Your link makes it look like they're gleaning information from local newspapers ("Burglary occurred at such and such place, stopped by home owner," etc.). Which is fine and well, but, uh, the particular page you linked to is showing 18 incidents over a two month period, so I doubt this is the actual source of that data.
I believe Gary Kleck is the source of that number, doing some googling. Various other surveys state that we see between 800K and 2.5M uses per year.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
Regardless of the actual number, it is not an inconsequential figure; I don't disagree at all with that.
But, the fact remains that, even if the number is 800K, or 2M, or 2.5M, or whatever number, that means that 800K, 2M, or 2.5M people made the decision to attempt to burglarize, rob, rape, or murder somebody; while the scenario ending with the victim alive and safe is the preferable one, I don't think the prevalence of CCW/gun ownership was really a deterrent in those situations. Rather, as Mu-Meson pointed out, long-term trends have shown violent crime to be on the decline in this country; I believe that, while increased gun ownership/CCW may have contributed to that in some respect, it is not the sole cause.
Think of it this way: in this country, we've generally seen a trend towards "getting tough on crime." That usually manifests itself in harsher sentencing guidelines, which means that more violent criminals are generally in jail for a longer period of time. It stands to reason that this would contribute to a decline in violent crime. Similarly, (this recession being an exception), we've seen increases in the number of police officers in this country; it stands to reason that a higher police presence should deter crime, but again, this can't be the sole cause. I follow this same line of logic for gun ownership/CCW. I believe that violent crime rates are a result of a basket of contributing factors, but your answer as to why they've been steadily declining despite periods of (low/high gun ownership/CCW rates, gun control laws/lack thereof, tough/lenient sentencing guidelines, low/high numbers of police officers -- there have been changes in all of these over the past 40 or so years, but violent crime has still been steadily decreasing) probably lies in demographic and socioeconomic factors, rather than being attributable to some sort of policy that government has implemented.
To me, CCW is an option to not be victimized; if things go wrong, it gives the victim the chance to leave the situation alive and unharmed. And I'm fully supportive of everybody's right to do that; hell, I do it myself. However, I don't necessarily think that it should be presented as "why" violent crime is down.
Last edited by NeedsABetterName; 06-19-2012 at 10:27 PM. Reason: Edited to clarify, re-word certian things.
You guys have to realize that the argument in OP is actually a reaction or counter argument toward anti-gun groups, such as Brady.
In the years before CCW became wide-spread in most states, Brady and other anti gun groups claimed that CCW would cause violent crime skyrocketing.
(this statement is still on Brady's site)
I don't know how much CCW reduced violent crimes in large scale, but I am certain that "guns running apocalypse" Brady suggested is not true from both governmental and NGO statistic.
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