New Study Shows CCW Saves Lives
Those of us who have been raised with firearms as a family value have always held that guns save lives. Now there’s a yet another study that helps prove this is true.
Professor of Economics at Quinnipiac University, Mark Gius has looked at 30 years of gun crime trends to determine how effective restrictive gun laws have been at making communities safer. “Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level.”
Anyone familiar with Dr. John Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime has already read most of the conclusions of the new study. Those who warned that the United States would become a shooting gallery with the legalization of Concealed Carry laws keep being proven wrong, resoundingly. Even Police Chiefs and Sherriffs throughout the nation are advising the citizens of their towns to start carrying. Most recently, the James Criag, the Police Chief in Detroit, warned the citizens of his murder plagued town that the best thing they could do to reduce crime and protect themselves was to carry a gun legally. “If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them ,” Criag said.
Meanwhile, in the Boston Globe recently reported that the incredibly restrictive 1998 Massachusetts gun control law only served to punish and discourage legal gun owners, sharply reducing the number of gun licenses from 1.5 million in 1998 to 200,000 in 2002. Meanwhile, Aggravated assualts jumped by 26.7%, and robbery with firearms spiked by 20.7% from 1998 to 2011.
“The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons”
–Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes & Punishments, translated from the Italian with a commentary, attributed to M. de Voltaire, translated from the French (New York: Stephen Gould, 1809), 124-125.
