Guns in bars

Great Debates
203

Too many believe that a concealed weapon permit automatically confirms good sense. It does not.

Dateline 2014: Jury convicts Milwaukee concealed-carry permit holder in fatal shooting. Phillip Green was bar-hopping with friends in Wisconsin. During an altercation about whether they should go to a strip-bar (Green said no) his friend apparently started a fight. The second friend tried to stop it. Green decided to shoot his attacker dead and was convicted of murder.

That’s what happens when you allow concealed carry killers in bars. The danger isn’t limited to those establishments: these drunks can bring their mayhem everywhere.

Another example comes from Ohio. Back in 2011 Chad O’Reilly apparently didn’t like the way another patron was looking at him. So he threatened to kill him: [INDENT] “This law is so absurd,” said Toby Hoover, director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. “Without this law, maybe some fists would have flied. Instead, he’s waving a gun around.”

…
The H&H Tavern had no such sign, but owner Dave Anderson said it soon will. He said his bar never had a problem with gun-toting patrons before and blames the new law for the incident Wednesday morning.

“I believe in the right to bear arms, but I believe that law was made in bad judgment,” Anderson said. “It’s not good for any small business to have people carrying firearms in.” [/INDENT] I agree with pub owner Dave Anderson: the constitution protects the right to join a well regulated militia, but that doesn’t mean you should wave your gun around and threaten to kill people. Quick thinking by unarmed clientele or employees saved lives.

Over in Virginia, concealed handgun permit holder Evan Gargiulo shot and killed cab drive Mazhar Nazir. He had been at a nightclub, gone home, picked up his gun and continued on to friend’s house. So technically this killer wasn’t carrying his weapon in a bar as he was headed to a condo: he had been partying in DC where gun laws are stricter. But once this concealed carry psycho got to Virginia, he remembered his love of weaponry. The cab driver paid the price once Gargiulo discovered that he had lost the cash necessary to pay the $130 fare. Citizens of DC thanked their wise legislators for encouraging such maniacs to keep their weapons at home. Virginia | VPC: Concealed Carry Killers

Here’s the problem though. This webpage lists 15 concealed carry killers from Virginia. We have a small numbers problem: like most people concealed carry killers don’t spend the bulk of their time in bars. Also, as seen above, this law can be implicated in situations when a drunk carries his weapon to a bar, but then decides to fire away at some other location. As it is a followup newspaper article on this sort of law written one year after its passage in Ohio basically concludes, “Meh”. Which suggests a situation that has little in common with the OK Coral.

More seriously, I pulled a number of scholarly articles but I am uncertain about whether they have anything noteworthy. We’ll see.

ETA: Thanks to Bricker for resurrecting this thread.

204

One thing that’s clear is that there’s been no sudden bloodbath following passage of these laws, but nor have establishments posting No Gun signs seen an uptick in criminality, paranoid predictions notwithstanding. As background, alcohol is implicated in 40% of all robbery, assault, and violent crime. ( Victim survey: http://www.bjs.gov/content/acf/ac10.pdf , as cited in Henderson.)

There’s a decent 25 page paper on the subject which I believe was written by a law student. It’s about North Carolina’s version of the law:

Henderson, Tim, “WHY WE CAN’T DRINK IN PEACE: Alcohol, place-based violence, concealed carry, & HB 937” December 13, 2013

It was one of the top 3 papers in Professor Joseph Kennedy’s Spring 2014 law seminar on self defense. Congratulations Mr. Henderson!
http://lawofselfdefense.web.unc.edu/past-published-seminar-papers/

205

This invariably happens. Florida, the first state to consider shall-issue CCW, was a huge ideological battleground where anti-gun people were screaming “there will be gunfights over parking spaces, it’ll be like the old west!”

And when Florida made it legal for a few years, and we found that there was no additional violence at all from concealed carriers, and in fact concealed carriers were one of the most lawful groups you could find, more law obeying than police officers. All of their hysteria was disproven pretty conclusively.

So the next batch of states debated concealed carry, and the same people showed up and said “There will be gun fights over parking spaces, it’ll be a blood bath!”, and in turn, those states saw no problems created by the issuing of concealed carry permits. Years of data had consistently demonstrated that concealed carriers were extremely well behaved.

And years later, one by one, other states adopted shall issue concealed carry laws. And even with a decade+ of very conclusive data that it isn’t a public safety threat, we still hear “there will be gunfights over parking lots! there will be a bloodbath!”

I’m not sure when that bloodbath is coming, or when we’re supposed to become the old west, but we have, what, a 20+ year history of remarkable, near-perfect behavior by millions of citizens licensed to carry concealed? It’s actually kind of a marvel at just how well behaved those citizens are, because if one of them fucked up, it would be all over the news. The news would love to jump on a story like that. And yet with decades and millions of licensed carriers - basically nothing. That’s fucking remarkable. Amazing, even.

And yet if one of the few states that don’t allow shall-issue permits debated whether or not they should, after all this time and all of that amazing good behavior, we’d still hear “there will be bloodbaths in the streets!”

Similarly here are the attitudes towards this law. Sure, nothing bad actually happened, as we could’ve predicted, but that bloodbath is just around the corner, right?

It’s issues like this that make me wonder if the left is more fact-based and in tune with reality than the right sheerly by coincidence - that their agenda just happens to be far more in line with reality than the right wing agenda - and not that they’re better at accepting and analyzing reality which then in turn informs their views.

206

No. At least, I won’t.

But I will take the opportunity now to point out the reluctance with which you serve up that admission, and suggest to you that in the future, a conflict between your inchoate fears and the actual facts should be more easily resolved. An admission that you were wrong shouldn’t have to be extracted from you like a dentist would a molar.

207

I don’t wonder it: I am convinced of it. I wince at the rejection of global warming by the right, and the resistance by influential segments of the right of things like evolution. These foolish positions allow a claim that the left is more evidence-based…but that’s not so. It simply happens that on these positions, the preferred goal of the left lines up with the facts. And you have only to look at the gun issue to see the reverse demonstrated. Naturally, there are aspects of “the gun question,” that are purely subjective policy and don’t have an objective answer. But this specific aspect does, and the willingness of the left to weigh ideology against fact and pick ideology as the winner is evident.

208

Well, I assume the gunfights in the old west were about hitching posts rather than parking spaces per se.

209

imho, what we’re seeing is that all the people who wanted to carry guns and commit violence with them were carrying illegally already, and that legalized carry didn’t significantly expand the pool of yahoos with guns.

I think the next threshold will be “Constitutional” (i.e., 2nd Amendment) carry, when not even requiring permits to carry will result in remarkably few additional incidents.

210

Even NPR, which is constantly identified as a “Liberal” news source states that, despite the number of guns per capita doubling from 1968 through 2009, the rate of gun related violence is down 75% from 1993 through 2010.

CITE

211

(my bold)

I’m thinking your didn’t phrase this how you intended because it’s hard to tell what you are trying to say. What is “that’s” referring to? Are you implying a causal relationship here? I think you’re making the same error that Captain Amazing was making earlier, only evaluating the anecdotal negative outcomes while ignoring both the positive outcomes and the comparison to a hypothetical control group.

The law in question doesn’t “allow concealed carry killers in bars” but I’m not sure what you mean by this. The phrasing seems to be a kind of freudian slip.

And who believes that a concealed carry permit automatically confirms good sense? I think it’s a self selecting group willing to go through the administrative process to obtain one, and generally those that are willing to do so are not criminals since the process would prohibit them from being successful.

212

Gee, you dig up a five year old thread to gloat about how you were right and I was wrong, after doing the exact same thing a year ago, and then get surprised I don’t take it with the best grace? Guilty, I guess.

213

I would identify NPR as an honest news source. And they are honestly reporting on a particular study concerning homicide.

This is also true:

The rate (number per 100,000) population American dying from gunshot has been pretty steady:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

I can’t find the number for 2012, but in 2013, the rate was higher than in any year cited above – 10.6 per 100,000:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm

There’s a tendency for suicide to go up when homicide goes down, and visa versa. And (with the exception of a small number of suicides by people already quite close to end of life due to terminal illness), both are tragic. And guns make both attempted murder and attempted suicide much more likely to be fatal.

It’s good that crime is down. This doesn’t change the evidence that more people being armed mean more death:

P.S. While more people being armed means more death, the same person who has guns buying more doesn’t necessarily increase death rates. I don’t think the percentage of the population who has guns has changed all that much, and certainly it hasn’t doubled. That’s why the gun death rate is only up a little despite the big increase in gun sales. It’s mostly gun lovers getting a bigger arsenal.

214

Here some evidence to support the P.S. in my last post:

Share of Homes With Guns Shows 4-Decade Decline

You are right about the number of guns per capita. But it’s mostly a matter of gun enthusiasts upping the size of their collection.

215

The evidence is mixed regarding the percentage of households owning guns. The General Social Survey shows a decline while Gallup shows fluctuation around a constant trend. I’d be more likely to trust the GSS, but a more detailed investigation would be helpful. Anyway, yes, the rise in the number of guns corresponds to a rise in the number of guns per household. Section 3: Gun Ownership Trends and Demographics | Pew Research Center

Nice try.

The left adopted free market positions on tradeable emission permits, managed care, rent control and the negative income tax: you see no analagous intellectual flexibility on the right. What we are seeing with guns is two effects: one is a pro-urban bias on the part of the media. The second link is the NRA’s hostility to scientific investigation of gun violence. Generate solid evidence and the American center-left will come around.

It’s true that there has been no bloodbath. But it’s also true that there’s no pubic safety justification for these sorts of laws. When criminals are killed, it’s generally by cops or other criminals. It’s not by victims. I’ll say it again: what we need is a pro-science, pro-safety, pro-technology gun enthusiast organization. What we have now are hysterics. That’s why you can’t get serious people on board.

Improve your game and the American center left will listen. We have a track record of doing that.

Rhetoric, hyperbole, broad brushes and comedy.

This touches upon a mistake I made in September 2011. I thought there would be sufficient evidence for a serious evaluation by this time. My take is different now: I don’t think we’ll be able to generate a rich enough dataset to do a regression analysis because concealed carry events are rare and concealed carry events in one venue or another are rarer.

I think a risk assessment approach could be applied. For example, the CCW guy who murdered the taxi driver over the $130 fare simply shouldn’t have grabbed a gun when he went out that evening. It was a poor decision. A gun enthusiast group that cared about its membership would walk them through some of the risks and benefits of carrying under different circumstances and support research into the same.

I agree that discussions regarding anecdotes are highly dubious. I report on such mayhem as a correction for the nonsense that the NRA mails to its subscribers every goddam month. It’s basically all anecdote and no data. Which is fine, except they oppose data collection efforts. It’s not enough to mislead their readers: they have to oppose science as well.

The evidence I’ve seen indicates that gun owners are more likely to engage in risky behavior (heavy drinking, drunk driving) while those who have taken a gun safety course are neither more or less likely to do so than the average person who doesn’t own a gun. That implies to me that CCW folks aren’t particularly responsible or irresponsible.

That effect should shift as the CCW requirements become more lax and that group aligns with the fun house mirror risk perceptions of the general gun owning population.

Caveat: the study I mentioned controlled for gender and race and IIRC age. It controlled for state of residence. But there wasn’t an urban / rural variable unfortunately, though state of residence would pick some of that up.

216

It could be just me, but I still have no idea what you are saying with this.

cite?

So you would expect to see some shift towards … whatever you are trying to characterize in the 6 states that have constitutional carry already, right? Are you making a prediction?

217

I’ve presented this a couple of times before. Here’s one link: Guns and alcohol: Gun owners drink more and take more risks, study says
You can google this if you wish: “Association between firearm ownership, firearm-related risk and risk reduction behaviours and alcohol-related risk behaviours” by Garen J Wintemute

Sort of. I’m saying that CCW folk surveyed from 1996-97 are likely to have taken a gun safety course. As the population of CCW folk becomes more diverse, I expect that they will tend to more closely resemble the wider gun toting population, relatively speaking.

The counter argument is that the act of filling out paperwork alone is likely to make them different from the typical gun owner. I think the differences will narrow.

Ok. I’m saying I choose my phrasing on gun mayhem partly for comic effect. I noted upthread my motivation for providing a contrast with NRA depictions of gun owners.

Specifically, “That’s what happens when you allow concealed carry killers in bars,” followed by a reference to, “These drunks”, is an application of the broad brush fallacy. The serious point which I buried was that permitting concealed carry in bars has effects that extend beyond those establishments: the scene of the crime in that case was in a private automobile. In another it was a taxi cab.

218

Why?

If I’m right and you’re wrong, why should you be reluctant to admit it? Aren’t you interested in the truth, regardless of who was right?

I’ve been wrong. I’ve admitted it, perfectly cheerfully. I’ve bumped my own years-old threads to acknowledge my own error. What’s so terrifying about it? You don’t accumulate such-and-so many 'error points" and then have a hand removed at the wrist. You don’t get a pay cut or lose your season tickets to the WWE. Why should you be reluctant to simply say, “Yeah, I was off base here?”

219

What I don’t really get, Captain Amazing, is why your position is immutable. I can see that you might not be convinced by the (admittedly rather scant) evidence that this legislation hasn’t increased gun crime. What I don’t understand is why you wouldn’t accept any amount of evidence. I agree with you that in theory this should make Virginia’s bars more dangerous. However, sometimes even the most logical predictions turn out to be wrong.

220

I can read the abstract but can’t access the full source article. Is it available? From what I read it is not very compelling. It seems to make associations with risk factors but doesn’t actually conclude anything causal. It’s not a revelation to say that firearms and impaired judgment are poor partners.

What do you mean by diverse? What do you mean when you say “more closely resemble” Can you be specific? I want to narrow down your prediction.

Let me see if I am following. You made an admittedly poor argument on purpose while trying to simultaneously make a real argument, expecting the reader to tell which is which? I find both to be of similar quality. Your ‘serious’ point is that permitting concealed carry in bars having effects outside of those bars is rather simple. To make an actual meaningful argument you would somehow have to demonstrate that permitting concealed carry in bars has a unique effect that doesn’t exist when they are not allowed in bars.

There will always be stupid people doing stupid things. For your serious point to have any persuasive value you have to demonstrate that on balance, allowing concealed carry in bars increases the number of stupid people doing stupid things. Essentially the entire point of reviving this many year old thread - which shows the exact opposite of what your serious point is trying to demonstrate.

221

Closer, but not quite…

Context matters. Henderson (2013) noted that gun advocates used exclusively anecdotal evidence when they successfully pushed for North Carolina’s CCW guns-in-bars program. No studies. This fits a pattern. Kevin Drum: [INDENT][INDENT]…when it’s time to pass pro-gun laws, emotionalism over a single incident is the order of the day. But when those laws go awry, we need to put on our Spock ears and soberly weigh all the facts and evidence in the cold light of day. [/INDENT][/INDENT]

Bricker resuscitated this thread to see what happened in Virginia some five years after it passed its law. I assembled the evidence: basically there are some anecdotes and one paper. I wholeheartedly agree that anecdotes are weak evidence. I present them because the NRA does the same every goddam month. Unlike myself, they do so without caveats or qualification.

Absolutely, anecdotal evidence is weak and arguments that rely on them should be regarded dubiously.

Well that’s easy. Allowing CCW in bars makes it more likely that untrained gun enthusiasts will carry their firearms around: that will result in some mix of appropriate and inappropriate usage. It’s the cost-benefit analysis which is more challenging.

My anecdotal evidence confirms that there are indeed costs to permitting CCW. Obvious? Sure, to most normal people.

See post 148 in this thread for my summary. PDF!: http://www.waveedfund.org/sites/waveedfund.org/files/wintemute%20guns%20alcohol_0.pdf

It’s a real study. It has weaknesses. But efforts like that are a lot better than the slanted assemblage of anecdotes, presented every month by the NRA. I showed upthread that two can play at that game. Unlike the NRA, I enthusiastically concede that the exercise is ridiculous.

The study confirms that after controlling for various demographic factors, gun owners are more likely to binge drink, drive drunk and engage in alcoholism (my terms). This suggests that they may have piss-poor risk assessment capabilities.

There are caveats. There’s a subtle broad-brush fallacy in my claim. Just because gun owners have a statistically higher share of drunks in their group, doesn’t mean that the typical gun owner is a drunk. (By way of analogy, males are also more likely to be alcoholic than female, but that doesn’t imply anything about the typical male.) Nonetheless, I think I can say that a scientific and pro-consumer gun advocacy group would warn their membership about these sorts of relationships and dangers.

Unfortunately, the prediction can’t be hammered down, because I haven’t demonstrated a solid baseline of CCW behavior. We only have a proxy for that (attendence at a gun safety course).

My hypothesis though is that gun owners exhibit riskier behaviors than those who do not own guns. CCW folks though are closer to the non-gun owning group, at least to the extent that there are special requirements involved. It follows that when such requirements are loosened that CCW folk will more closely resemble the wider gun owning population.

It’s an hypothesis: I can imagine being wrong. Examples of risky behaviors include drinking 5+ units of alcohol in a single sitting within the past week, drinking more than 60 drinks/month, drinking and driving, not wearing a seatbelt while driving, etc. The studied covered all but the last one.

Bricker appeared to assume that there was no evidence for mayhem following laws permitting guns in bars. That is not the case. Furthermore, he has not established any public safety benefits from this law. So the cost/benefit so far favors the gun control case.

Well not really. Given the paucity of anecdotes, one could argue that the convenience of the many outweighs the potential mortal costs to the few, especially when the latter are tenuous.

222

So let’s get this straight.

Five years ago, a proposal to permit CCW holders to carry in bars is debated. The suggestion is not to allow this, because mayhem will result and CCW holders will be involved in bar shooting incidents. The law passes.

Five years later, not one single example of a CCW holder shooting in a bar has occurred.

But this has no evidentiary value at all.

What would?

What length of time, if any, without such incidents would be sufficient to prove that the mayhem-Sayers were in error?