New Crime Prevention Research Study Finds 12.8 Million Concealed Carry Permit Holders

CPRC has the story here.  The study notes that the number of concealed handgun permits is increasing at an ever- increasing rate with a 15.4% increase in just one single year. Slightly over five percent of the total adult population has a permit, five states now have more than 10% of their adult population with concealed handgun permits and ten states no longer require a permit to carry in all or virtually all of the state. According to the study, this is a major reason why legal carrying handguns is growing faster than the number of permits.  Also of note, since 2007, permits for women have increased by 270% and for men by156%.  The study also found some evidence suggesting that permit holding by minorities is increasing more than twice as fast as for whites. Yet the gun ban lobby tells us that gun ownership continues to decline and that minorities don't support the right of self-defense.

Washington Post Blogger Encourages Hillary to Keep Talking About Gun Control

What a difference between 2008 and 2016..  During 2008, Hillary Clinton rarely talked about gun control during her campaign for the Democratic nomination.  Democrats did not want to talk about guns in congressional elections either in 2010 and 2012.  That all changed after the Sandy Hook school shooting.  The Charleston church shooting gave them even more resolve.  Hillary Clinton doesn't shy away from the subject.


On Friday, the Washington Post Plum Line blog's Paul Waldman encouraged her to keep talking about it, even though she is unlikely to get anything passed if she is elected:

Let’s address the matter of the gun issue’s political potency first. As is the case on so many issues, the Republican position is more popular when the questions are vague, while the Democratic position is more popular when the questions are specific. If you look at polling on guns, what you see is that the country is split pretty evenly on the broad question of whether gun laws should be more strict or less strict. But particular measures to regulate guns get much more support, especially universal background checks, which as many as nine out of ten Americans endorse.

At some point in this discussion, someone will always say: “But what about the NRA? They’re so powerful!” The NRA’s power is real in some ways and illusory in others, and it’s important to understand which is which. When it comes to lobbying, the NRA is indeed hugely powerful. It has the ability to stop any legislation on guns, often before it even gets written. But elections are an entirely different story. Almost all the congressional candidates who win the NRA’s supposedly coveted endorsement are Republican incumbents from conservative districts who win their elections by huge margins. When Republicans have a good election, as they did in 2014 and 2010, the NRA rushes to reporters to claim credit, saying the election proves that voters will punish any candidate who isn’t pro-gun. But when Democrats have a good election, as they did in 2012 and 2008, the NRA is strangely silent.

Waldman also trots out the gun ban lobby's talking point that gun ownership has steadily declined since the 1970's, inferring that sooner or later, there won't be enough gun owners to matter.  Waldman links to a New York Times article that sites the General Social Survey (GSS) for it's source to back up the claim of declining gun ownership.  But other surveys show very different data related to gun ownership. The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has pointed out:

...the GSS survey shows a large drop that you don’t see in many other surveys.  According to Gallup, in October 2011, they wrote: “At 47%, reported gun ownership is the highest it has been in nearly two decades — a finding that may be related to Americans’ dampened support for gun-control laws.”

CRPC notes that a more accurate way is to look at the number of firearm permits year over year.  While few states require licensing of gun owners, Illinois requires a Firearms Owner ID or FOID card to own a firearm.  If the number of cards increase, it stands to follow that is because there are new gun owners who have applied for those cards.  You can also look at the number of concealed carry permits:

The number of concealed handgun permits also provide some information, with the number of permits increasing from about 4.6 million in 2007 to well over 9.3 million at the beginning of 2013.

All you have to do is talk to firearm instructors to know that all those new firearm purchases were not made by current gun owners.  It simply does not make since that someone who has owned firearms for years would all of a sudden start signing up for firearms training classes.  Ask any firearms instructor and they will tell you they see a lot of first time gun owners in their classes.  Now if we could just get them all to vote to protect their freedom.

But to Waldman's larger point that Hillary should continue to talk about the issue, let's hope gun owners see the real threat of another four years of an anti-rights Democrat in the White House and will do what it takes to see it does not happen.

Another Anti-Gun "More Guns Equal More Crime" Study

Tuesday, Live Science touted a new study by Harvard Injury Control Research Center Director David Hemenway and fellow researchers Michael Monuteaux, Lois K. Lee, Rebekah Mannix, and Eric W. Fleegler that makes the claim that guns don't deter crime:

"We found no support for the hypothesis that owning more guns leads to a drop or a reduction in violent crime," said study researcher Michael Monuteaux, an epidemiologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "Instead, we found the opposite."

The Crime Prevention Research Center got a copy and found that the study did not test the theory that it claims to have studied.  CPRC notes that the study doesn't test whether increased gun ownership causes crime rates to increase, and is "far too simplistic and doesn’t include even the basic control variables that are typically included in other crime studies."

Here is a simple example.  Many people point to the fact that the UK has both a lower homicide and gun ownership rate than the United States.  The claim is often made then that the reason that they have a lower homicide rate is because they have fewer guns.  However, this ignores the fact that the UK homicide rate actually went up after their 1997 handgun ban or after their other very strict earlier gun control regulations.  The UK homicide rate still remained low relative to the US, but it was higher than it otherwise would have been.

The point here is simple: there are lots of reasons why the UK homicide rate was lower than that in the US before they even had gun control.  The question that needs to be asked is how the UK homicide rate changed relative to that in the US after its gun control regulations went into effect.  To do this, you have to control for the fact that the UK had a much lower homicide rate to begin with.  Statistically you do that by having what are called geographic “fixed effects” (dummy variables that pick up the average difference in each jurisdiction that you are examining).  Any test would also do the same thing by year so as to account for any national trends in crime rates.  So, for example, crime might have been falling nationally, but was it falling relatively more in those states that were getting more gun ownership.

And that's not all.  Anti-rights researchers tend to cherry pick the data they use to prove their hypothesis and this study is no different:

The controls that are being used in this paper can’t begin to account for the differences in crime rates.  The regression estimates reported in Table 2 don’t tell what percent of the variation in crime rates are being explained by the variables used in these regressions, but I am willing to bet that it is less than 10 percent.

Yet, this paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine doesn’t account for either of these factors.  It is essentially making a purely cross-sectional comparison across states.  On account of that, if they had included Washington, DC in their estimates (with its high crime rates and low gun ownership), it would have dramatically altered their results.

This is another study that appears to be swimming up stream as public opinion is firmly on the side of gun ownership.  Even cherry picking data probably won't change that fact.

Crime Prevention Research Center Event at NRA Annual Meetings

Dr. John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center is holding two events in conjuction with the NRA Annual Meetings in Nashville on April 10 and 11th.  Confirmed special guests include Katie Pavlich and Dana Loesch, among others:

On Friday, April 10th, the Crime Prevention Research Center will be having Desserts and Coffee/Tea at the Hilton Nashville Downtown from 6 to 9 PM.  For those attending the Dessert and Coffee/Tea from 6:45 to 9, the cost is $50.  For those attending both the dessert and the much smaller stand up dinner, the cost is $200.  The Hilton is adjacent to the Nashville Convention Center, which will be hosting the NRA National Convention at that time.  On Saturday, April 11th, you have a chance to go shooting with your favorite celebrity at Tennessee’s 5-star range, The Nashville Armory (just a 12-minute car ride from the Hilton).  The event will go from 8:30 to 10 AM. Funds from the event will be used to finance the Crime Prevention Research Center.

If you plan to be in Nashville for the Annual meeting, you may want to RSVP for this event

Violence Policy Center's Misleading Concealed Carry Study

The Violence Policy Center (VPC) comes out with a study each year that purports to show concealed carry permit holders are dangerous.  Yesterday the New York Times editorialized about the latest study in the usual fawning manner they do with anything having to do with gun control.  Even if VPC's number of 722 "non self-defense" deaths caused by 544 concealed carry permit holders were correct, you would still be talking an infinitesimal percentage of the estimated 11 million permit holders in the country.  But, as Bob Owens over at BearingArms.com points out, there are a lot of caveats that go with the particular incidents VPC includes in their study:

In order to demonize the practice of concealed carry, the Violence Police Center ran into the insurmountable hurdle of not being able to find a significant number of concealed carriers using their legally concealed weapons to commit violent crimes.
In order to pad their report, VPC was forced to:

1. include incidents where concealed carry was in no way part of the alleged crime.
2. include incidents where there wasn’t even a conviction, but just allegations of a crime.
3. include unsubstantiated, apparently mythical “crimes” without a named victim or perpetrator.

Owens also noted that and some of the people that VPC called murderers were either exonerated in court or had charges against them dismissed.

There is no getting around the fact that concealed carry permit holders are some of the most law abiding people in the country.  That's why groups like VPC have to use "slight of hand" tactics to try and make their case.  People like the editors at the New York Times won't check VPC's numbers.  Thankfully there is the new media to get the truth out.

CPRC Corrects Bloomberg Errors

Earlier this week, Dr. John Lott had this piece on FoxNews.com talking about Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun propaganda and the errors that are inherent in the reports his various groups put into the pubic domain.

Every single report released by Bloomberg’s groups has contained major errors.  A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center has corrected Everytown’s July study on “mass shootings”: again, it is no different – lots of errors, but worldwide publicity touting the erroneous claims.

These errors include things like where an attack occurred, padding numbers to included killings by gang members and including stabbing deaths in their numbers - errors that Dr. Lott told NRANews.com's Cam Edwards  yesterday that even his 12 year-old daughter could fact check.

New Study Challenges Obama and Media Claim Regarding Firearm Research

A new study by the Crime Prevention Research Center has released the results of a study that challenges the myth perpetrated by the gun ban lobby, its lackeys in the administration, and the mainstream media, that the NRA is responsible for squashing academic research related to firearms.

There is no evidence that gun control research fell when restrictions were put on federally funded research. Indeed, whether one looks at the number of total articles or total pages, firearms research has been as high or higher than when the restrictions were enacted. In 2013, well before federal funding could have any impact on publications, there was an explosion in firearms research in medical journals.

The mainstream media falls all over itself to repeat the talking points of the gun ban lobby. Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns has been among the loudest making the claim that there is a lack of research on firearms. CPRC concludes in it's study:

Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns appears to be so anti-gun that they have been willing to manipulate their data to get their desired results. Unfortunately, data manipulation is appearing to be a consistent pattern Mayors Against Illegal Guns reports, and the misrepresentations can be seen in their studies from shootings in gun-free zones to the number of school shootings since Newtown.

Hat tip to Dr. John Lott.