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njlauren -> RE: Concealed Carry In Florida (3/25/2013 9:42:58 PM)
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This is known as cherry picking statistics to prove a point and leaving out others that don't fit the agenda. As others have pointed out, crime figures have been dropping nationally,in states with easy carry laws and states with restrictive ones.
NYC has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, and the violent crime rate is one of the lowest in the world, there are 650 murders in NYC last year, in a city of 8 million where there are 15 million in it on a given day...
Point 2: Simply citing the statistic, that handgun sales went up X %, and crime dropped Y %, is meaningless, there is an expression there, that results don't imply causality. It is why when they do epidemiological studies, they carefully factor out factors that can cause the results they see, they analyze the data to see if they can show causality. For example, the studies showing that gun ownership equals safer streets, if you just looked at the stats, it might look to appear that way; but if you look at other factors, for example, that in the period mentioned that the economy boomed, jobs were plentiful, then that could very well be the reason why crime dropped (I am not saying this with the real study, hypothetically). Or it could be, for example, that during that time period, cops started using new methods, they pressure pointed particularly violent areas, and as a result a lot of gang members and illegal guns were pulled off the street........
One thing I suggest doing, look at FBI crime stats, especially when it comes to violent crimes, and you will see something interesting.Both Florida and Texas have very easy gun laws, especially in terms of carrying a weapon, yet both of them are up their in the crime stats, Texas was top 5, and a lot of the states where gun ownership (off the top of my head, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia) were up there in the stats..whereas states like NY, NJ, and Connecticut, where gun ownership is difficult and carry permits even harder, were way down.
There are exceptions, of course, Montana and Wyoming have a lot of gun ownership, but their crime is low, but then again, they also are not densely populated, population is pretty scattered, which tends to damp down crime.
One of the problems is there are no real stats out there , no real studies on for example the effectiveness of guns on crime. If the theory of the NRA is correct, that gun ownership should lead to lower crime rates, then why are Texas and Florida so high in the crime stats? Conversely, NYC should be awash in bodies, since few people legally own guns, but it isn't, and its overall crime rates are pretty low, same with NJ and Connecticut. The reason there are no real studies is that congress, thanks to the lobbying of the NRA, refuses to allocate money to serious studies of the issue, to gather real stats on gun violence and to do longitudinal studies of gun violence, gun ownership. Not only don't they fund it, but there are actual laws forbidding the government from authorizing studies like that, and places that receive federal funding have been warned off of doing serious studies...and I don't wonder why, if what the NRA says is true, that gun ownership reduces crime, that guns are not a significant part of violent crime and so forth, then why is it through their lobbying they make sure no one tries to find out the truth? Maybe because a lot of it will refute what they say?
BTW, I also would be careful about guns preventing crime for another reason. Only about 35% of people in the US own guns, and that alone can cast doubt on the idea of guns being crime prevention, if 65% of the people don't own guns, and gun ownership is concentrated in a limited swatch of the country in terms of population (i.e, it is a lot more prevalent in rural areas, in more rural states), then it won't be of much deterrence to criminals. A lot less then 35% of the people in the northeast here own guns, I am pretty certain of it, yet our crime rates are low.
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