3.8 "Permitting people to carry concealed weapons will lead to increased violent crime, and people killing each other at the slightest provocation."
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This article is from the talk.politics.guns Official Pro-Gun FAQ, by Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) with numerous contributions by others.
3.8 "Permitting people to carry concealed weapons will lead to increased violent crime, and people killing each other at the slightest provocation."
See LaPierre,"Guns, Crime and Freedom,"where he devotes an entire
chapter (Chapter 4) to this.
also
"Commonplace Book_by Thomas Jefferson (G. Chinard ed., 1926), p.314
Kleck,"Point Blank,"pp.411-414.
"Uniform Crime Reports,"FBI (1992)
and
Florida Statutes, title 46, sec. 790.06, pp.590-597 (amended 1992)
In summary: Persons who go to the effort and expense of obtaining
a permit to carry a concealed weapon (which, to use Florida's 1987
law as an example, requires 6 months or longer residency, being
over 21 years of age, able bodied, not a drug abuser or alcoholic,
completion of a firearms safety course, no felonies or violent
misdemeanors or record of being committed for mental illness, sworn
application on file listing name, address, place and date of birth,
race, and occupation, and including a statement that the applicant
meets the above criteria, a $125 application fee [renewable after
three years for $100], a full set of fingerprints, and a color photo),
and who submit to a full background check to verify the application
and check fingerprints, are not the sorts of people who abuse
firearms. The permit process acts quite effectively to select for
law-abiding citizens rather than trigger-happy criminals, and the
records of those states which have liberalized their concealed carry
laws show this. Of the 204,108 licenses issued in the Florida law's
first 6 1/2 years of operation, seventeen (17, or .008%) were
revoked for unlawful conduct while the firearm was present, and many
of these violations were either technical (such as carrying into a
restricted area, like an airport or bar) or non-gun related (such
as revoking a permit due to a drunken driving arrest). In Oregon,
over 60,000 concealed carry permits have been issued, and none has
been revoked.
In light of these successes, many other states, Tennessee, Arizona,
Wyoming, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Texas,
Oklahoma, and most recently, Kentucky and South Carolina, have joined
the ranks of states protecting the individual right to self defense
through reformed concealed carry laws. One state, Vermont, even allows
concealed carry without a permit, and has little crime. (The complete
list of 31 states having non-discretionary, or so-called "shall issue"
concealed carry laws: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CT, FL, GA, ID, IN, KY, LA, ME,
MS, MT, NV, NH, NC, ND, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT*, VA, WA,
WV, WY. *VT requires no permit.) The impact of such laws on fighting
crime is debatable at a purely statistical level, but states which issue
concealed carry permits to their law-abiding population show less
violent crime in general than those which do not, and rates of some
crimes (such as homicide and robbery) which are 50% lower than states
in which concealed carry is not permitted. These states, it could be
argued, may have had less crime than restrictive states to begin with,
but the dire predictions by "gun control" advocates that violent crime
would increase in these states following liberalization of concealed
carry have not proven to be valid (see also 3.8.a).
At an individual level, many carry permit holders have already
saved their own lives and the lives of others in the face of criminal
violence. Armed citizens, permit or not, kill almost as many criminals
each year as do law enforcement officers (some 348 out of 763, or 46%
of justifiable homicides in 1992), and armed citizens are less likely
to have "bad shoots" than the police, since, unlike the police, they
aren't usually arriving late at the scene and_then_having to figure
out who the bad guys are. Armed citizens may in fact kill far more
criminals in justifiable shootings than the police, since statistics
which are available reflect only the initial determinations about a
shooting incident, and not the verdict in the case after it has
actually been tried. Police are more often given the benefit of the
doubt in shooting incidents than are private citizens. But, as is
pointed out elsewhere (see 1.1), the true measure of the ability of
firearms to fight crime isn't found in the body count, but in
criminals wounded, deterred from violence by fear that a potential
victim may be armed, or driven away without even firing a shot.
The fact that laws against carrying weapons were ineffective
against crime was no secret to Thomas Jefferson, who hand-copied
this quotation from the 18th century Italian criminologist Cesare
Beccaria's 1764 book_On Crimes and Punishments_into his own notebook
on law and government, a quote which sums up well the arguments of
those who defend the right to keep and bear arms:
"False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand
real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience;
that would take fire from men because it burns, and water
because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils
except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of
arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who
are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it
be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the
most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code,
will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can
be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly
obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty --so dear to men,
so dear to the enlightened legislator-- and subject innocent
persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to
suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and
better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage
than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked
with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be
designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes,
produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts,
and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences
and advantages of a universal decree."
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