http://www.examiner.com/x-2944-Denver-G ... aled-carry
Big cities need concealed carry
March 20, 11:43 AM ·
Start with facts: rocks are harder than grapes, some people are killed by guns, etc. When we begin to organize those facts, we build data: Rocks are harder than any fruit, this number of people were killed by guns in the U.S. in 2007, etc. When the facts and data have become a framework of knowledge, some useful conclusions can be drawn. A most helpful framework as been created by John Lott, a researcher at the School of Law at Yale University, and chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1999. He studied the crime statistics for 2,853 counties in America for the period 1977 to 1992 for a book called "More Guns, Less Crime" and added data for 1993 and 1994 as the data became available from the FBI. Before the second edition published, he updated his research with crime statistics through 1997. That is a huge body of data!
It has been said by some big city mayors, among them Rudy Giuliani of New York that in the rural areas of America, people should be able to carry guns because the police are too far away and too few. In the cities, they say, it is a different situation. Concealed carry in cities is a threat to public safety. Time after time, we see the tightest gun control efforts in the biggest cities of our country. The District of Columbia is fighting tooth and nail the recent D.C vs Heller decision which reaffirmed the citizen's right to keep and bear arms. And exactly, why is that? I have given it a great deal of thought, and compared the environments. In Laramie, Wyoming, if you are in a crowded restaurant on a Friday night, the next restaurant is several blocks away and the next town is 50 miles of prairie away. Nonetheless, you find yourself in a crowded restaurant. Within those walls it is exactly the same experience as being in a crowded restaurant in downtown Denver where the next restaurant is sharing a wall with yours. In Laramie, when you are in your apartment, it is you and your family. In Denver when you are in your apartment, it is you and your family. There may be more units attached to your Denver apartment, but the feeling inside the home is the same. In the classroom, there is the teacher and her 25 students in Laramie, and in Denver. There are many more schools in Denver, but the classroom environment is very similar. At work, you sit at your desk and can see roughly the same number of co-workers in the room with you in Laramie and in Denver (except for the whole-floor cube farms of Dilbert fame). A small auto glass shop in Laramie looks like the same business in Denver. For the vast majority of us, the experience we have in our homes and places of work and play are not terribly different between small town and big city. Yes, Denver has traffic on a cobweb of highways that Laramie doesn't, but most murders, rapes, and assaults occur in homes, businesses and on the streets while folks are walking. Where is the difference?
How about police? The police forces in Laramie and Denver are vastly different. It takes far fewer police to cover 25,000 people than it does to cover 588,349. How fast do the police respond? It is usually pretty fast in both cases. In Laramie, they might have to drive 8 miles on empty streets to get to a call, while Denver police might only have to roll 10 blocks though traffic, then up three floors. It nets out. Still, it reminds me of the saying "When seconds count, we're there in a minute!" It is never fast enough, and often not fast enough to actually prevent the crime.
How about gun accidents? Surely here is a difference. If a gun goes off accidentally in Laramie, the chance of hitting someone must be less than in Denver. OK. But according to the facts, in 2005, the most recent year for complete US data, there were 789 accidental deaths caused by guns in the U.S according to the Center for Disease Control. That is not zero, but it isn't much for 295 million people. (That compares to 23,618 accidental poisonings in the same year) You can't make gun control policy on such a slim percentage, and you sure as heck can't legislate on hypothisized conclusions from anecdotal lore.
So, how do the two environments compare statistically? John Lott says:
"The most densely populated areas are the ones most helped by concealed-handgun laws. Passing a concealed-handgun law lowers the murder rates in counties with about 3,000 people per square mile by 8.5%, 12 times more than it lowers murders in the average county. The only real difference between the results for population and population density occur for the burglary rate, where concealed-handgun laws are associated with a small reduction in burglaries for the most densely populated areas."
Here is where the anti-gun crowd begins to go off the rails. The data accumulated and studied clearly shows a pronounced improvement in the safety of city dwellers with the passage of "shall-issue" concealed carry laws. Why should large cities be identified as requiring tighter gun control than rural areas? Again I ask, where is the difference?
