“...the state’s roster of concealed carry permit holders...”
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Well, there’s your problem, right there.
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.