Exactly.
The irony is he doesn’t acknowledge that the permitting is what enabled him to look at the data of gun owners. Go to a state that doesn’t have permits, take 240,000 random citizens from the phone books, and I bet in a 5 year period about 2500 of those random people would be accused of some kind of serious crime too. The article is bogus because the underlying assumption is that gun owners are more prone to crime - there would be no story if they took a random selection of citizens and found out that 8% of them committed a crime.
My point is that (while I disagree with the permit process, you don’t need a permit to exercise a fundamental right) the permit process allows the state to disarm people a lot easier. There are millions of guns in New York state but the cities and state probably has no clue which of the people they arrest have weapons stashed. In NC because of the permit process the state knows to disarm those people - right or wrong. In NYC they can’t even do that much.
The U.S. violent crime rate for the general population was 403.6 / 100,000 in 2010 (source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports). Note that this is just violent crime, which is a subset of felonies, and yet still the general population of the U.S. is more than 23 times more likely to commit a violent crime.
I'll take my chances with the concealed carry population, thank you very much. I wonder what Michael Luo would prefer?
Frankly, I could in general care less about the misdemeanors Luo lumps into his numbers in a transparent attempt to make the numbers look worse for concealed carry holders. Heck, you can probably get one of those for littering. I'll have to ask my friend who was ticketed for throwing boiled peanut hulls out the car window while riding around in rural GA, surely one of the most absurd citations ever. I expect this sort of event would have ended up in Luo's numbers.
Luo clearly has an agenda here, and it isn't a fair and transparent analysis of the data surrounding crime by CCW holders. If he were interested in such a thing, he could have easily included a comparison such as the one I generated above with just a few minutes of research.
Regarding your "In NC because of the permit process the state knows to disarm those people," no one should be disarmed because of a misdemeanor citation. Be careful what you suggest.