Posted on 09/05/2019 7:47:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Since 2015, residents of the state of Maine have been allowed to carry a concealed firearm without any special permit, and now the results are in: crime has fallen to the point where the state is now rated the safest in the nation from the threat of crime. The Maine Examiner reports:
When Maine passed a “Constitutional Carry” law allowing Maine residents to carry a concealed firearm without any special permit in 2015, opponents of the law forecast a dangerous future for the state. They said the new law would hurt public safety and put Maine kids at risk.
One state representative who opposed the bill went so far as to say it would give Mainers a reason to be afraid every time they went out in public or to work.
Another state representative suggested the law would lead to violent criminals with recent arrests and convictions legally carrying handguns.
They were wrong, as wrong as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors labeling the NRA a “terrorist organization.” And for the same reason, the notion that a physical object, not human beings, causes evil. The US News &World Report rankings of the safest states has named Maine as the safest state in the nation.
Public safety makes up 50 percent of the Best States for crime & corrections ranking. This subcategory evaluates both the violent crime rate and the property crime rate in each state, as measured by the FBI in 2017. Though some major cities, such as Chicago and Baltimore, have seen drastic increases in homicides in recent years, overall violent crime and property crime rates remain near historic lows.
A higher state ranking indicates a lower crime rate for these metrics. Maine ranks first in the nation for public safety.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
“WHAT IS THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE STATE OF MAINE?”
You already know the answer.
A better, more complex, question is what sub-cultures are present.
Looking at how gun ownership is distributed across the sub-cultures would also be interesting.
A government that has a working relationship with its citizens that trusts them to be self-policing says something about the government—but it says more about the citizens who elected the government.
| Race | Population (2016 est.) | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Total population | 1,329,923 | 100% |
| White | 1,260,476 | 94.8% |
| Black or African American | 16,303 | 1.2% |
| American Indian and Alaska Native | 8,013 | 0.6% |
| Asian | 14,643 | 1.1% |
| Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander | 211 | 0.0% |
| Some other race | 3,151 | 0.2% |
| Two or more races | 27,126 | 2.0% |
According to the 2016 American Community Survey, 1.5% of Maine's population were of Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race): Mexican (0.4%), Puerto Rican (0.4%), Cuban (0.1%), and other Hispanic or Latino origin (0.6%).[59] The five largest ancestry groups were: English (20.7%), Irish (17.3%), French (15.7%), German (8.1%), and American (7.8%).[60]
People citing that they are American are of overwhelmingly English descent, but have ancestry that has been in the region for so long (often since the 1600s) that they choose to identify simply as Americans.[61][62][63][64][65][66][67]
Near 0% street gangs would be my guess.
Without the gangs crime rates among different groups would fall dramatically even in the most dangerous States and though the residual effects may take time to go away those too eventually would.
Pretty much...
Vermont is even more White and they have Reelected Sanders and that other nut job Leahy for Decades.
Vermont had Constitutional Carry before Constitutional Carry was cool.
There are some confused Liberals living there. You could almost think they were Libertarians, almost.
While in the Air Force, I worked with three or four Mainers, and they are about the weirdest people in the US. From conversations, you eventually noted that virtually no one moves to Maine, and that society is fairly set in their ways.
This successful experiment by Maine is what Justice Brandeis was talking about when he wrote the following.
Justice Brandeis had put it this way.
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose [emphasis added], serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” — Justice Brandeis, Laboratories of democracy.
(Note that constitutional limits on states as laboratories of democracy is that states cannot establish privileged / protected classes or abridge constitutionally enumerated rights, and must maintain a constitutionally guaranteed republican form of government.)
All other states need to look over Maine’s shoulder and seriously consider experimenting with such a law, an uncommon common sense law imo.
And if more states decide to experiment and get the same good results from their experiments then Congress should consider exercising its express 14th Amendment power to strengthen constitutionally enumerated rights, 2nd Amendment in this example, to make national concealed carry law.
From the 14th Amendment:
"Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States [emphasis added]; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
"Section 5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
In the meanwhile, patriots will need to make sure that we’ve got a patriot Congress that would be willing to make such a law.
Corrections, insights welcome.
Remember in November 2020!
MAGA! Now KAG! (Keep America Great!)
Irrelevant. Gun laws changed, demographics remained constant, crime went down.....therefore demographics was not the cause of the drop in crime.
The relevance is that it is the safest US state. The effectiveness of the law and Maine being the safest state are 2 different issues. So the drop in crime speaks to the effectiveness of the law, but Maine’s being the safest state speaks to the demographics.
I still can’t figure out VT. The residents talk about freedom, constitutional carry, etc. but keep voting for leftists.
Demographics and population density are the two most important factors in the equation.
With all the Islamic imports, Portland will not stay safe for long.
Not really. The drop in crime "does" speak to the effectiveness of the law, but if Maine was NOT the "safest state" before the passage of the law, demographics can only explain a relatively high score on "safeness", but not a change from "high score" to "high-est score". The change in law accounts for both.
Interesting that Alaska is at the bottom.
I started to describe the small town I live in, but thought better of it.
People leave their keys in their trucks and their front doors unlocked at night here.
Of course this is not Anchorage, Juneau or Ketchikan. Just three thousand souls on an island.
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