James Craig, formerly of LAPD for 28 years and then chief of police of Portland Maine, and now Detroit's police chief changed his views on tight control of permits to carry a concealed weapon.
Quote:
“Coming from California, where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of [carrying concealed weapon permits, or CCWs], and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation,” he said. “I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”
Robyn Thomas, director of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco, however, criticized Craig’s conclusion.
....“There’s no research that shows guns make anyone safer, and it does show that, the more guns in any situation, the higher the likelihood of them harming either the owner, or people who have access to them.”
Yet just two months ago, the very research Thomas says doesn’t exist was published in Volume 21, Issue 4, of the prestigious Applied Economic Letters, whose editorial board includes professors from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT and more.
According to the study’s abstract, published Nov. 26, 2013, Quinnipiac University’s Mark Gius found that even after adjusting for state- and year-specific trends, passing restrictive concealed weapons laws may actually increase murder rates.
End quote.Read more at WND.
More:
Two new studies released at the beginning of May 2013 have shown that the primary factor in the reduction of the number of gun homicides and violent gun crimes is not gun control, but rather the proliferation of legal gun ownership.
In a study released by Pew Research, violent gun crimes are significantly lower now than they were at their peak during the mid 1990s. Gun homicides declined 49% from 1993 to 2010, despite the fact that population in the United States grew during the same period.
The City of Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in America, yet in 2012 there were 512 gun related homicides, an increase of 15% over 2011. The murder rate in Chicago three times the murder rate in the rest of Illinois. Law enforcement also reports that 80% of the murders and shootings in Chicago are gang-related. It would appear that the 'gun problem' in Chicago is really more of a 'gang problem'.
Of course nearly four years ago John Lott came out with a book on this very issue, "More Guns, Less Crime" using statistical models and loads of crime data.
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