More Guns, More Crime?

Read this, tell me what you think. Essentially the article says “More cases of concealed carrying, more cases of violent crime.”

What do you think?

A study and article written with “synthetic” information makes it a fictional story.

You don’t need a degree or some high level of intelligence to look at stats. The states that have the most restrictive gun laws in the country still have a gun problem and most cases a very bad gun problem.

Also I take issue with the title of the article. I don’t care if me carrying makes my state safer or not. I’m not protecting my state. I’m protecting myself and my family.

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Quick response… time to sleep… :sleeping:

I don’t think that CC raises number of crimes. CC owner doesn’t commit the crime, he/she mostly prevents it.
If bad guys know that majority get the guns, they are not courageous anymore.

There are still plenty of people who are afraid of guns and don’t know how to react correctly (or just do not react at all). They have to learn how to live with guns.

And I do not believe in statistics, I see the facts.

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As a security officer, in my experience, criminal activity stops when they are aware of people being armed,
All the red zone s suggest that the crime rate increased because of gun restrictions

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@WildRose What do you think about this? The idea that citizens concealed carrying ADDING violent crime strikes me as hard to believe. It would basically assume that law-abiding concealed carriers are the ones committing the crime, since if lawful concealed carry goes up, so does crime. That would be the only thing that makes sense to me. And what do you think about the use of “synthetic” data?

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Yep. Why are shooting ranges not mass-shot up more? Why are the places that are being shot up typically gun-free zones? This idea that higher lawful concealed carry = more crime confuses me as to what conclusion they are trying to draw. That lawful concealed carriers are therefore, because they are carrying, more likely to commit violent crime?

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All the actual data shows the opposite.

All we have to do is look at the numbers as far as those carrying under license who commit crimes with a firearm and that number is astronomically low.

The only places we’re seeing any consistent increase in violent crime is in places where carry is heavily restricted, and/or all but non existent.

We also see that as carry becomes lawful in areas with the highest crime rates the increase in carry follows the rise in violent crime rather than preceding it.

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Unfortunately we have no more than a small minority carrying on a daily basis anywhere in the US outside of a few small communities that specifically were created for gun owners and those who desire to carry regularly.

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i just dont get how the study would find an increase in violent crime with an increase in lawful concealed carry. lawful. how would that make sense?

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There is data and there is fiction. The two have nothing to do with each other.

There IS NO predicting what would have happened there is only looking at what DID happen. Otherwise it’s not DATA. :woman_facepalming:

For me there’s no point reading past here:

The researchers built fictional, or “synthetic,” states as near -identical counterparts to the 33 that passed right-to-carry laws between 1981 and 2014. Using the states’ crime rates prior to the laws’ adoption, as well as national crime data from before and after, they created an algorithm to estimate

In other words, they made stuff up to demonstrate their theory.

The article calls it “an unusual method”. The reason its unusual is because it’s NOT an acceptable scientific practice. If it were acceptable, the entire scientific community would do it. So basically, its entirely BS.

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exactly what i was thinking :joy: how is that scientific? a study comparing the state to a fictional counterpart? not a great study.

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@Liam looking at this kind of data is extremely complex, you can’t just compare the number of permit holders to the amount of crime. Economic conditions, social conditions, crime trends in populations of that type, both in like-type cities and nationwide have to be considered. It’s hard work and simple analysis will always mislead.

My home state of Missouri is sometimes used to “prove” that constitutional carry makes for more murders… in fact the data proves otherwise but you have to understand what is actually going on.

Missouri had one of the fastest rising murder rates in the country… this is actually not a state-wide problem but a Kansas city and St. Louis problem because the rest of the state has very low rates. Nonetheless the social, economic, racial, and cultural issues in those two cities are significant. And they have been getting worse for a couple of decades.

If you just look at the number of murders each year from 2005 (when gun laws began their evolution to constitutional carry) to now it has gone up every year. However if you look at the RATE of increase (how fast is it going up, or the percentage it goes up by each year) rather than the number of murders, the rate took a definitive downturn when state laws changed in the constitutional carry direction.

What that tells you, in understanding the totality of the data, is that there are factors driving the murder rate up in those cities but constitutional carry acts to apply the brakes to the murder rate.

Murders are heavily concentrated in the inner city black communities where it seems they are practically trying to extermate themselves. And that rate of increase in murders was pretty steep. It appears that community rapidly adopted the constitutional carry idea and the rate of increase immediately slowed.

There are still many places in St. Louis you don’t want to be after dark, but if one were to apply the “imaginary data” rule that article proposes, it would have continued to get worse without Missouri’s gun law improvements.

As the adage goes, there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics. One can make the same data tell different stories, if you’re willing to cherry-pick the data you like, and exclude that you don’t. Sometimes that’s just laziness, sometimes it’s the researchers bias operating outside their self-awareness, sometimes its deliberate.

Be very careful you understand not just the conclusions, but how they were arrived at.

“While it is true that the murder rate in Missouri rose 17 percent relative to the rest of the U.S. in the five years after 2007, it had actually increased by 32 percent during the previous five years. The question is why the Missouri murder rate was increasing relative to the rest of the United States at a slower rate after the change in the law than it did prior to it. Missouri was on an ominous path before the law was ended.”

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The fact that they use synthetic data does not support a reasonable conclusion. there is data available that corroborates the fact that crime has decreased in states where concealed carry is legal. There is also data that supports the conclusion that the highest rates of violent crimes occur in those areas where the gun laws are the strictest.

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The rise in crime, real or percieved typically precipitates the rise in new permits being issued. The need drives the end result.

You also have to remember there are also numerous factors that play into someone making the decision to carry.

Night before last I was talking with a friend who’d recently starting locking the gate to her stable. I asked if she’d had a theft problem pop up and told me of an attempted sexual assault just a few days prior that prompted her to not only lock the gate, it’s why she called as she suddenly felt the need to get her LTC.

Because he didn’t quite go far enough to be arrested, thee will be no recorded effect on the crime rate but it enraged and scared the hell out of her so he’s been posted off the property, and issued a protective order and the police told him if he set foot on the property again she’d be perfectly justified in shooting him on the spot.

Need driven but not statistically driven.

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Well said. The actual arrests in the state and convictions of permit holders for violent felonies would be the only real data that can be applied and in every state in the US permit holders are the most law abiding demographic of all.

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And that gets harder to be accurate with since we’re a constitutional carry state now and there’s no permit required. There is no reliable data about how many people carry today in Missouri… anybody could be.

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And this is the way it should be. Rapists, mass murderers, bank robbers etc would think twice if they thought the next person MIGHT be armed.

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In my opinion, the deep State want to disarm the American people so that they can have total control,never have I ever knew of a criminal following the law look at Chicago They have the strictice gun laws,and the highest crime rate
More law’s won’t matter, except for the taking away from the law-abiding citizen, it’s not a matter of the gun,it’s about control, if someone really wanted to kill you,they could use a number of things, in my opinion a disarmed society is a slave society to the GOVERNMENT you don’t believe that, look at all the countries that took guns from the citizens, most people were killed and the rest became slaves to that government(communist,) countries

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What if Alexander the Great had fighter jets? What if the Spanish Armada included submarines? What if the Spartan 300 were terminator robots? These ridiculous questions have as much scientific value as the “synthetic controls” touted by this researcher.

Lets.consider something closer to a situation which actually could have happened. What if the Confederacy had succeeded in establishing an independent country? What would that country look like today. We could make guesses, we could compare and contrast, we could draw economic models, but could never know what such a country would look like. We can only guess, and guessing is, by its very nature, rooted in bias and opinion. Interesting perhaps as a thought experiment, but useless fantasy in any scientific setting.

I can hear my dad speaking from the grave: Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.

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Not a “deep state” issue particularly. We’ve had a large anti gun movement among the political elites for many decades and they’ve been right up front with it.

The “deep state” is more about having essentially a shadow gov’t inside of the federal gov’t consisting of unelected bureaucrats controlling and “guiding” policy from the shadows and controlling with quiet power the elected officials.

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