New Research Paper from John Lott, et al

[foszoe]

KY and MI are let downs. MO too.

 

[GodFearinGunTotin]

KY and MI are let downs. MO too.

KY is an OC-no permit required state. Reckon that might have a bearing?

 

[jamil]

GFGT's map got me looking at statistics for the past hour and comparing various social circumstances by state to gun murders. Some things that seem to correlate fairly well to gun murders rates are, in no particular order, gun ownership rate, education levels, income, rural vs urban, and unwed mother rates.

I didn't take time to do all the calculations, but just comparing the numbers it does not look like gun ownership rates correlate well to gun murder rates.

The states that have very high gun ownership sometimes have higher than average murder rates, and sometimes have very low murder rates. Education and income correlates better. Urban vs rural population somewhat. And it seems pretty obvious that if you live in an area with a large population of unwed mothers, the murder rate will be very high.

Sometime I'd like to compare those social attributes to other countries that have much lower gun murder rates, because I'm pretty sure they'll tend to have lower murder rates because of other social factors than just gun ownership.

 

[actaeon277]

number of concealed handgun permits has soared, growing from 4.6 million in 2007 to over 12.8 million this year

He's not the "salesman of the year" for nothing.
I love telling anti-gunners that if they had kept their mouths shut, there'd be less guns and carrying going on.
I can see the steam off their ears.


And that's in addition to

In ten states, a permit is no longer required to carry in all or virtually all of the state. This is a major reason why legal carrying handguns is growing so much faster than the number of permits.

 

[Cola76]

KY is an OC-no permit required state. Reckon that might have a bearing?

Training is required in KY as well, which the study established as a factor that limits the number of permit holders.

 

[Cameramonkey]

John Lott is one of the heroes of the gun rights movement. He is an economist who started out to write about the effects on guns on US society, expecting to them to be negative. But when he collected the info, he found out that firearm ownership was actually associated with positive results. Rather than lying, misinterpreting, or dropping the subject as some have, he ended up writing the book "More Guns, Less Crime".

Since that time, he has become an outspoken gun rights proponent, both in media and further writings. He also started the Crime Prevention Research Center which continues to dig up statistical info that we end up using as factual counterarguments against the anti-gunners (like the "coincidence" of increasing firearm ownership in recent decades and declining violent crime). CPRC has a lot less money to work with than Bloomberg's group and depends primarily on contributions, so you might want to consider helping.

Amazing how you can find some weird, unexpected stuff in statistics; Another unrelated fun read is from the guys who wrote Freakanomics. Long story short they found that more abortions seem to loosely correlate with lower crime 15+ years later. The theory is that the more impoverished couples and single women who make crappy parents DONT have kids out of wedlock, the fewer delinquents are created who will go on to commit crimes later. Fascinating.

Not saying abortion is good by any means... lets make that clear and not head down that right/wrong discussion path... Just that laws of unintended consequences can be fickle, and totally unrelated research can reveal what in hindsight makes perfect sense.

 

[Alamo]

Amazing how you can find some weird, unexpected stuff in statistics; Another unrelated fun read is from the guys who wrote Freakanomics. Long story short they found that more abortions seem to loosely correlate with lower crime 15+ years later. The theory is that the more impoverished couples and single women who make crappy parents DONT have kids out of wedlock, the fewer delinquents are created who will go on to commit crimes later. Fascinating.

Not saying abortion is good by any means... lets make that clear and not head down that right/wrong discussion path... Just that laws of unintended consequences can be fickle, and totally unrelated research can reveal what in hindsight makes perfect sense.

There are other economists, John Lott among them (but not the only one) who argue that Levitt and Donohue (the Freakonomics authors) got this wrong.