Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Fact-check: Drivers who carry guns are 44% more likely than unarmed drivers to make obscene gestures at other motorists, and 77% more likely to follow them aggressively.
• Among Texans convicted of serious crimes, those with concealed-handgun licenses were sentenced for threatening someone with a firearm 4.8 times more than those without.
• In states with Stand Your Ground and other laws making it easier to shoot in self-defense, those policies have been linked to a 7 to 10% increase in homicides.
4 comments:
About that first link…
Research on Guns and Road Rage
The authors make a simple comparison between those who have had a gun at least once in their car and those who didn't and say that the respective numbers are 23% and 16%. The authors imply that having a gun makes it more likely that one will engage in road rage.
There are multiple concerns with this analyis. Their questions make no attempt to ask whether a gun was in the car at the time the road rage incident occurred. Nor did they attempt to differentiate law-abiding permit holders from those who illegally possessed guns (e.g., asking respondents if they have a permit to carry a gun). This last point seems particularly important given that they want to make policy conclusions on concealed carry laws.
The paper also has some funny results. For example, Liberals are apparently much more likely to engage in road rage than conservatives and the difference is larger than the difference between those who did and did not have a gun at least one time in their car over the last year. This variable is apparently never investigated, but presumably they are also concerned about liberals being allowed to drive cars.
So apparently we shouldn't be banning guns, we should be banning leftists!
Despite almost four million Americans currently having permits to carry concealed handguns and some states having these laws for as long as eighty years, there is only one case in Alabama where a permitted concealed handgun was used to commit road rage. There are also other much more direct mesaures that indicate that people who have concealed handgun permits and who thus carry guns in their cars legally. For example, the fact that permit holders tend to be extremely law-abiding and lose their permit for violating gun regulations occurs for only hundredths or thousandths of one percent of permit holders. If they used their guns in the way that the authors of this study fear, their permits would have been revoked.
Then there are several updates where he asked the authors to submit their data for peer review. They refused. Once again, it's "science!" as practiced by the Global Warming crowd. (Which, unsurprisingly, is to violate the scientific method.)
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Given the following…
This first part of the 2nd Amendment establishes the intention to repel invasion, suppress insurrection, and locally enforce the law.
— Markadelphia
and this…
10 USC § 311 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
… how is the militia supposed to "repel invasion, suppress insurrection" and prevent "representatives of the people [from] betray[ing] their constituents" (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper 28) if you have taken away the weapons they need to succeed at those purposes? (35 days and counting)
About that second link…
Myth #3
This is a comment on a blog analyzing the study and Mother Jones' use of it.
There's too much to quote, so I'll have to pick out a few points. Definitely go read the whole thing.
Second, the study does not compare apples to apples. It compares convictions to arrests, and backs up this methodology with specious and circular reasoning:
Quote:
To investigate differences in licensee and nonlicensee populations, we compared the 2001 to 2009 Texas CHL conviction data with national arrest data for the same years that provided information on both the offense alleged and the arrestees’ demographic characteristics (age, race, and gender). Arrests obviously differ from convictions. However, our interest was not in direct comparisons of these 2 populations but in comparing the distribution of arrests across different types of crimes and the distribution of convictions across different types of crimes.
Arrests compared to convictions!?! Last time I checked, a person could be arrested with charges subsequently dropped, nevermind actually convicted making the arrest rate always higher than the conviction rate.
Problem #2: The MJ article conveniently disregards the primary results of the study- that CHL holders are NOT a significant danger overall.
Here's what the study said:
CHL holders were much less likely than nonlicensees to be convicted of crimes.
Even with all the study's problems, they still had to admit that CHL holders were more law abiding than average. But of course, Mother Jones couldn't admit that without damaging their propaganda.
A more meaningful comparison would be to compare the relative prevalence of Deadly Conduct offenses by CHL holders to the population in general. At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, I'll use 2010 numbers, simply because they're readily available.
Number of Active CHL Holders + Instructors in 2010: 463,888 (DPS)
Deadly Conduct convictions of CHL holders in 2010, both classes: 14 (DPS)
463,888 / 14 = 33,135 active CHL holders and instructors per Deadly Conduct conviction by a CHL holder
TX Population in 2010: 25,145,561 (US Census Bureau)
Deadly Conduct convictions in 2010, overall, both classes: 2,006 (DPS)
25,145,561 / 2,006 = 12,535 TX residents per Deadly Conduct conviction in TX
33,135 / 12,535 = 2.6
IOW using 2010 numbers, a member of the overall population of TX (including CHL holders) was 2.6 times more likely to be convicted of a Deadly Conduct offense than a CHL holder would be.
Let me repeat that. Members of the general population were convicted of a Deadly Conduct crime 2.6 TIMES more often than a CHL holder was.
Are you sensing a pattern yet?
The first study is a self-reported study of 2400 drivers. It’s odd it is invoked since it recalls one of most conspicuous and inaccurate predictions of the gun-control advocates: that conceal-carry laws would create shootouts over car accidents. They didn’t. It also conflates correlation with causation. And it is frankly a bit pointless.
For the second study, I can only see the abstract. They did note that conceal-carry holders were less likely to be convicted of crimes but that their convictions were more likely to involves sexual offenses, gun offenses and offenses involving a death. There’s a bit of flim-flammery in that sentence, however and I can’t see the article to see if it’s born out. It seems to say that while gun owners are less likely to commit crimes, their crimes are likely to be more serious. What’s missing? Usually when something is stated that way, it’s to conceal that gun owners are less likely to commit crimes involving a death, gun or sex but slightly less less likely than they are to commit other crimes.
Back in this thing called reality, the Texas Department of Public Safety studied all crimes committed in Texas and found that less than 1% were committed by conceal-carry holders. That’s compared to about 2% of all Texans who have conceal-carry. Those results reflect the reality in other states as well.
The final study is problematic. If you look at the graphs they include, it’s clear that they’re looking at noise. But they then do a statistical analysis which has 9 dependent variables and and 11 control ones. This crosses me as a massive overfitting of the problem. What they show, at most, is that stand your ground states did not have the drop in crime in 2009 and 2010 that other states did. But the data are so noisy, it’s really hard to make that conclusion, especially when they, oddly, plot it in log space to conceal just how noisy the data are. It’s frankly bad science and crosses me as cherry-picking. I feel like Mother Jones did not look for the best study of this; they look for a study that supported their conclusions, no matter how faulty it was.
As I noted above, it’s very difficult to pick out the effect of CCL’s on violent crimes rates because crime has been falling everywhere. But this issues had been addressed in far more intelligent ways than three marginal studies.
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