For example, he said, an attacker may wrest control of a handgun away from a victim, who may be less experienced in handling firearms, and use it against the victim.
Also, otherwise law-abiding citizens may become "emboldened to do bad things, some of them violent" in the heat of the moment, Donohue said.
Yeah, it's supposed to be a scientific study, but all Donohue can engage in is hypotheticals. I expected as much. We'll have to meander over to Brookings and dissect the logic, or lack thereof, in this study.
I read the article to, and was amazed at the amount of speculation presented as fact. This is typical of the LAT, esp. on the 2nd. Amendment.
If its so damned easy to do, why dont the victims just wrest the weapon back? Shouldnt we just make it a law that all criminals HAVE to carry firearms and then when they do something stupid we can just "wrest control" of it from them...
I skimmed it. All it shows is that Lott's results are not robust to changes in specificataion and addition of new data (lot's dataset ended in 1992, this one in 1999). The only valid conclusion one can draw from Donohue's results is that concealed-carry laws don't affect crime rates very much one either way. The author is a lot more circumspect in his statements in the research paper than in the article.
I would think that the one who owns the firearm would tend to be more experienced than a thug who came unprepared.