Sigh. Tim, that article you posted is a perfect example of how you can lie with statistics. No doubt the author knows this.
If you look at the overall statistics, you find that about half of people killed are injured with firearms know the person who assaulted them. CC makes no difference in this situation, in fact, very well make it worse. Of the remaining, most are involved with drug or gang related activities, where the people involved on both sides are usually carrying, legally or not. Only a very small minority of those crimes aren't in those categories and hence, even possibly influenced by concealed carry.
Now, let's examine the statistics in that article. The thing that is glaringly ignored is that the states with restrictive gun laws tend to be states with a large percentage of urban dwellers, who are more likely to be involved in violent crime. So, unless the statistics are controlled for that, they are meaningless. So...
Now, why such an old article? There are a lot more recent figures available than 1992. The relevant statistics are made available annually. So if the article is claiming that 1992 was the most recent at the time of writing, then it must be close to 15 years old. One reason to stop at 1992 is that the correlation the author talks about falls apart after 1992. Most of the country hit a recession in 1991, but Florida was going through one of it's periodic property booms. So their economy was doing just fine. Since violent crime tends to correlate with the economic conditions.... |
