CCWs AND CRIME RATES

Anti-gunner fanatics claim that removing unreasonable restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms will lead to widespread carnage. They would have you believe that firearms deaths would skyrocket if all law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry protection against criminals. The facts show something different. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports for 1992 contains figures for the various States which can be compared on the basis of Highly Restrictive or Less Restrictive on concealed carry.

Let's take a look at some of those comparisons. The numbers are in crimes per 100,000 population. The figure listed as Improvement is the percentage by which the crime rate is lower in those states with less restrictive concealed carry laws.
Crime Type               Restrictive    Liberal     Improvement
                                 States           States

Violent Crime             798.30         631.60     20.88%
Homicide                     10.10             6.80      32.67%
Robbery                    289.70          183.10     36.79%
Aggravated Assault    455.90          398.30     12.63%

Florida enacted a liberal CCW law in 1987. From October 1987 through May 1994, Florida issued 227,569 permits. Of those, 18 (0.008%) were revoked because the permittee later committed a crime in which a gun was present. Oregon had to revoke 4 licenses out of 14,000 (0.03%) because the permittee was later convicted of a crime involving use or possession of a firearm. Vermont allows concealed carry of a firearm without a permit. That State consistently ranks at or near the bottom of the violent crime rate statistics. A study commissioned by the Colorado-based Independence Institute found that California counties which have the highest percentage of the population with concealed carry permits have a robbery rate 87% lower than those which issue the fewest percentage of permits. Those counties which have the lowest percent of permits to carry have the highest rates of aggravated assault, murder, rape, and robbery.

While we are on the subject of numbers used in reporting "good" or "bad" gun use, let's look at the widely touted study which claims that a gun at home is 43 times more likely to be used against the owner's family than against a criminal. That study looked at only that 0.1% of self-defense uses of a gun which resulted in the death of the criminal. The other 99.9% of all self defense uses of a gun were ignored. That study included suicides (85% of the total) as "family member killings." That study found that there were many other factors which "caused" greater risk than owning a gun. Those risks were ignored in the published report. NRA estimates that 0.2% of all firearms in the Unites States are used for criminal purposes each year. The very liberal and anti-gun New York Times published an estimate that fewer than 100,000 of the approximately 200,000,000 guns are used to commit crimes. This is 0.05%, much less than the NRA number.