[Puppage]

expounding on the "obvious" causal link between availability of guns and violent crime

Two things.....

1) Have these liberals ever tried to PURCHASE a gun? Cause it ain't like buying milk.

2) Of all the violent crime......how much is propagated by PERMIT HOLDERS?

Close to ZERO, I'm willing to bet. I read recently (can't recall where) that out of 180 thousand+ permits to carry concealed issued last year FOUR were revoked.

[King Prout]

well... Sean Penn, a convicted felon (assault and battery of a papparazzi) has both a CA carry permit and at least one handgun.
I suspect, for the Kultural Elite Leftists, it's a matter of "rights for me, not for thee"

[HowardC]

2) Of all the violent crime......how much is propagated by PERMIT HOLDERS?

Not many at all. Here's the stats from Texas:

In 2001 there were 180 convictions of CHL holders from a total of 35,070 criminal covictions. That's 0.51064%. That's right; about 1/2 percent. For 157 convicted murderers, 1 was a CHL holder. For AGGRAVATED ASSAULT ther were 17 out of 2,259. For ASSAULT there were 54 out of 17,309 convictions. The only crime CHL holders were convicted of that was 100% was 25 convictions of UNLAWFULLY CARRYING HANDGUN BY LICENSE HOLDER. They walked into a retricted area and had their gun on. Among law enforcement agencies in Texas, CHL holders have been called hyper-law abiding citizens. The DPS (Texas Highway Patrol) officer that stopped me once told me that he prefers to see the computer pop up with Texas CHL holder when he makes a stop. We've been pre-screened by not only Texas, but the FBI as well! He says that CHL holders are the most cooperative and friendly people he has contact with on a day to day basis. Bottom line: people that have a license to carry are much safer to be arround than the general population.

[Maelstrom]

Florida and Texas held statistics on the crime rate of CCW permit holders.

It was generally thousandths of a percent that engaged in any crime at all.

Maybe a half dozen over the entire course of the survey for both states combined were permit holders committing gun crimes.

Florida stopped tracking them because there were too few crimes to justify the programs continued funding.

I'm not sure if Texas still tracks them.