Posted on 12/30/2011 12:36:24 AM PST by neverdem
According to the New York Times, the answer seems to be “yes.” An article in yesterday’s Times by Michael Luo collects some anecdotes about misbehavior by a few licensees in North Carolina. The Times article has some numbers in it, and it provides the number of North Carolinians with carry permits (240,000). After a thorough search of North Carolina records, the Times finds that about 1% of permitees were convicted of something, other than a traffic offense, over the past five years. Of these 2,400 convictions, by far the largest group is “nearly 900 permit holders were convicted of drunken driving, a potentially volatile circumstance given the link between drinking and violence.”
“Drunk driving” (which, I would guess, the Times uses as a shorthand for lesser offenses such as driving while impaired) is a serious crime in itself. But just because a woman has three glasses of wine with dinner at a restaurant, and then gets caught in a police checkpoint, doesn’t make her some “potentially volatile” person who is going to murder somebody in an inebriated rage.
In any large population (e.g., 240,000) there will be at least a small percentage who over a period of time are found guilty of some crimes. This does not mean that that population as a whole is dangerous. It would have been useful to compare the conviction rates of North Carolinians who have carry licenses with the convictions rates of those who do not. I suspect that the non-licensee crime rate would be much higher, especially for violent gun crimes.
In a 2009 article in the Connecticut Law Review, I collected data from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. (The state data begin on page 564 of the article.) The data show that concealed carry licensees are much more law-abiding than...
(Excerpt) Read more at volokh.com ...
It's really amazing just how good the numbers actually are, especially the lack of negligent discharges
Ridiculous question from the NYT. How many working at 620 Eighth Ave. are packing....legally?
It is safe to say that if a writer is from NYC there is a 75% chance they are Batcrap crazy and off their medication!
plenty if Americans would agree that the New York Times is a menace to society.
There’s no guns in the utopia of NY, what are they afraid of besides southern food?
ping to interesting take on the NYT’s recent story (Luo)
NC has turned hard left, thanks to the influx of NE Libs and Governor “suspend elections for two years” Perdue. Raleigh is far too close to DC and has become contaminated. Glad to be back in WV..now I need to convince my grown children to leave NC.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2826665/posts
Cops may be a menace to society based on the way this article was written.
“a potentially volatile circumstance given the link between drinking and violence.:
And I always thought that the drinking was used as an anesthetic so the nagging outside world didn’t get to them and send them over the edge!
No wonder I feel so safe in NC... Everyone has a gun!
“NC has turned hard left, thanks to the influx of NE Libs”
Hey, not all of imported Yankees to NC are liberal. Some of us are conservative. The problem is, many of the newbies are from the “Left Coast.”
Just outside Raleigh is a booming city of CARY. Population about 135,000 people. The joke here is that CARY stands for “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.”
I did this in another thread about an article commenting on this latest bit of NYT anti-1A agitprop, only I used national statistics. I would guess that the general NC population probably has a slightly higher crime rate than the national figures I used, so the CCW group would look even better. What follows is that post:
Luo fails to make the obvious comparison [between CCW holders and the general population] because he and the Times are pushing an agenda. He and they are not interested in a fair transparent analysis of the facts.
Note that he touts 2400 "felonies and misdemeanors." Per the NY Times article, there were only 200 felony convictions out of those 2400 arrests over 5 years in a population of about a quarter million. That boils down to a rate of about 17 felonies / 100,000 population per year for the concealed carry population.
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 than the NC CCW permit holders are to commit a felony.
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 and the Times clearly have 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.
All I know is that I have killed less people with my handguns than Teddy Kennedy did with his car
“There’s no guns in the utopia of NY...”
Don’t kid yourself. You can guarantee that EVERY little old Hasidic Jewish man on West 47th St. (Diamond District) is packing an Uzi.
In a 2009 article in the Connecticut Law Review, I collected data from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. (The state data begin on page 564 of the article.) The data show that concealed carry licensees are much more law-abiding than...
There’s 564+ pages in this article??? [chuckles]
Looks top me like the NYT’s is more of a menace to trees and it’s own inductry, more than those of us who carry a firearm for “lawful, self-defensive” purposes...
Not that I believe the NYT’s is a definitive source of credible information on a great variety of things...
And how many of those 200 were actually carrying at the time?
In addition, how many people without a concealed carry permit were, in those five years, convicted of a felony while not carrying or carrying illegally?
Yes. We should eliminate the permits (but keep the concealed carrying). All government permits are a menace to society.
There’s no guns in the utopia of NY, what are they afraid of besides southern food?
Correct English pronunciation?
I read an article recently about the number of issued carry permits per thousand citizens. New York State was number one. The data below is from 2000. Several states don’t make the data available so it is likely that states like Arizona and Alaska may well have higher rates.
Permits per every 1,000 adults
1. New York 77.71
2. Indiana 67.02
3. Pennsylvania 56.16
4. Washington 51.41
5. Connecticut 48.75
6. Idaho 42.68
7. Utah 39.33
8. Tennessee 37.29
9. Kentucky 28.29
10. Florida 26.95
Newspapers that feel that CCW people are a danger to society are more dangerous than CCW carriers.
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