President Trump recently trotted out the good guy with a gun lie in relation to the Sutherland Springs, Texas shooting that was the worst mass shooting in the state's history. It's quite likely that he is completely unfamiliar with John Donohue's recent study that shows that states with right to carry laws generally have 13-15% higher gun violence rates.
Donohue uses additional statistical models than a similar report issued in 2004, and analyzes a further 14 years’ worth of data, from 2000-2014, during which 11 states introduced right-to-carry laws.
He claims not only a statistical association between right-to-carry laws and increased violent crime, but a causal link.
He uses statistical models to take into account other factors that could have an impact on violent crime rates to estimate what would have happened to those rates in various states if they had not introduced RTC laws when they did:
… [I]t might be the case that some states decided to fight crime by allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns while others decided to hire more police and incarcerate a greater number of convicted criminals.
If police and prisons were more effective in stopping crime, the “no controls” model might show that the crime experience in RTC states was worse than in other states even if this were not a true causal result of the adoption of RTC laws.
As it turns out, though, RTC states not only experienced higher rates of violent crime but they also had larger increases in incarceration and police than other states…RTC states did not have declining rates of incarceration or total police employees after adopting their RTC laws that might explain their relatively bad crime performance.
In short, the more guns, the more violent crime.
1 comment:
It's easy to see why places with guns have more violent crime. When you buy a gun for "protection" you are buying into the idea that violence and killing are the solution to your problems. When that mindset infiltrates society at large, children absorb that message almost literally with their mothers' milk.
When everyone thinks that violence is the solution to external threats, it's just a tiny step to seeing that violence is a way to get what you want. States that have the death penalty are pretty much the same states that have more guns.
In the end, it all devolves to the self-centered human-life-is-cheap survival-of-the-fittest social-Darwinism God-ordained-white-people-to-be-on-top philosophy of conservatives and libertarians.
For these people the only ones who deserve the good things in life are members of their in-group. The problem is that their in-group always demands more conformity, which means the in-group is constantly getting smaller and smaller.
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