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johnnyFive  ·  2326 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Do we really understand the Second Amendment anymore?

All your sources are biased too, so they must be wrong.

Huh, that was easy, I can see why people do it.

Anyway, none of those links get to what I was talking about, which was solely the idea that crime rates are lower among CCW holders. Meanwhile, looking at the VPC numbers he's refuting, they are pretty crap. Of 904 incidents, 44% are suicides (so have nothing to do with whether CCW holders are or are not more likely to commit a crime), and they also by their own admission count 93 (10% of the total) cases where the person hasn't been convicted. They also conveniently neglect to say how many CCW holders there are, or to make any kind of meaningful comparison. The Crime Prevention Research Center, which is John Lott's project, is the only place I can find a total for the number of CCW permits nationwide, although there is a smattering of articles talking about significant increases in the number of permits sought.

Here is a study that looked at data from Texas from 2001-2009. They found that concealed-carry permit holders had lower conviction rates than those without. This report from the Michigan State Police says that 2,553 permit holders were convicted of a crime. But that's any crime; they revoked 2,054 in the same time period, but I'm not sure what that means. Still, given that they issued over 170,000 permits in the same time period, I can't imagine that's a significant percentage.

Other research has suggested that right-to-carry laws lead to an increase in violent crime overall, but even then I haven't seen anything to suggest CCW holders themselves have higher conviction rates. Clearly something is going on, but that's outside the scope of what I was talking about.