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Gun Ownership Skyrockets, While Violent Crime Drops…Again

Friday, May 27, 2011

This week, the FBI estimated that the number of violent crimes decreased 5.5 percent from 2009 to 2010, including a 4.4 percent decrease in the number of murders. Because the U.S. population increased during the period, the figures imply that the total violent crime per capita rate and the murder rate decreased more than six percent and five percent, respectively. Based upon the preliminary data, it appears that violent crime fell to a 37-year low and murder fell to a 47-year low. The FBI will report final figures for 2010 later this year.


We’re repeating ourselves, but, as has been the case for quite a while, the decrease in crime coincided with an increase in the number of privately owned guns—particularly handguns and detachable magazine semi-automatic rifles. For example, Americans bought over 400,000 AR-15s in 2009, and trends in AR-15 sales over the last few years suggest a similar number for 2010.


Those who have followed the gun control issue for a few years probably have noticed that with crime declining and gun numbers rising year after year, gun control groups have all but abandoned their previously perennial claims that more guns equal more crime. Even their friends in the news media don’t believe it anymore. The Violence Policy Center and, breaking with past habit, the Brady Campaign didn’t even try to claim that the decrease in crime in 2010 was attributable to gun control.


Neither did Mayors Against Illegal Guns, headed by New York City’s gun control activist mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s rare and welcomed silence is to be expected in this instance, however. New York City’s murder rate rose 15 percent despite its severe gun laws, while Bloomberg dedicated himself and lots of money to criticizing the less restrictive laws that are in place in other parts of the country.


Speaking of cities with less restrictive gun laws, El Paso had the greatest decrease in murder—58 percent— among cities of over 500,000 population in 2010. For those who are counting, El Paso’s estimated murder rate was 0.8 per 100,000 population, while New York City’s was eight times higher at 6.4. Across the border from El Paso, in Juarez, where the gun laws are more to Bloomberg’s liking, the murder rate is over 100 per 100,000.


Adding to the bad news for gun control supporters, the District of Columbia and Chicago—the handgun bans of which were repealed following the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Heller and McDonald cases in 2008 and 2010—experienced decreases in murder of eight percent and six percent, respectively.


Film at 11....

Imagine that...

Less crime is great!

These new ar-15's and gun sales, went to new gun owners or existing ones?

How does one make the corellation from more guns to less crime? We have the highest gun ownership in the world, we should have like no crime at all.

The NRA has no agenda, so that's a great place to get info, right?

An academic review of Lott's work. This is just the conclusion, the link has so much information that proves a direct statistical correlation is impossible to draw and doesn't hold up.

CONCLUSION

Judge Richard Posner has recently criticized moral philosophy for failing
to persuade on any contentious issue.132 A similar criticism might be made of
quantitative empiricism. Readers might tend to accept only those quantitative
analyses that resonate with their prior normative beliefs. Indeed, Judge
Stephen Reinhardt famously proclaimed at a Yale seminar that social science
had never affected his judicial decisionmaking.133 And Donald Braman and
Dan Kahan have recently called upon econometricians like Lott and us to put
away our statistical packages. In a piece provocatively titled, More Statistics,
Less Persuasion, Braman and Kahan argue that rather than quantifying the
impact of gun control laws on crime, academics should dedicate themselves
to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the
cultural issues that divide them.134

We disagree. Over time, a body of empirical research can disentangle
thorny issues of causation and lead toward consensus. We view this Article as
playing a role in this process (not in ending the conversation). On net, we
believe that Lott and Mustards efforts made an important contribution to the
literature. They asked the initial question, amassed an important new panel
dataset, and then energetically and creatively analyzed it. (Indeed, their
dataset, which we know from experience was quite costly to construct, has been
used by many researchers to explore this and other questions about crime.)
Nevertheless, their results have not withstood the test of time. When we added
five years of county data and seven years of state data, allowing us to test an
additional fourteen jurisdictions that adopted shall-issue laws, the previous Lott
and Mustard findings proved not to be robust. Importantly, we showed that the
Lott and Mustard results collapse when the more complete county data is
subjected to less-constrained jurisdiction-specific specifications or when the
more-complete state data is tweaked in plausible ways. No longer can any
plausible case be made on statistical grounds that shall-issue laws are likely to
reduce crime for all or even most states. How much further one can go in
arguing that shall-issue laws likely increase crime across the board or have
heterogeneous effects across states (albeit most commonly pernicious) will be
matters about which various analysts will differ. We conclude with Learned
Hands advice that, unlike a policy advocate, an academic must keep an open
mind to every disconcerting fact, [and] an open ear to the cold voice of doubt.
Hand admonished: You may not carry a sword beneath a scholars gown.135

http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayers/Ayres_Donohue_article.pdf

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Have gun....will travel.

If you apply the Socrates Method, it would be that simple.

However; when you seperate the wrong from the right you're able to focus on what is the truth and what is a lie.

We have far too many laws and legislation on guns and firearms.

We love to pass more too. Don't dare enforce the laws that are already on the books, nooooo...say...we could probably use that same logic for immigration too!

Then again, I'm one of the citizens that want landmines, gun turrets and predator drones!

Kick the can...kick the can