I think the same people who will ignore the “you can’t drink” part are probably the same people who previously ignored the “you can’t bring a handgun in a bar” part.
Again, it’s worth pointing out that while there is always value in identifying speculation as such, this particular issue now has a year’s worth of actual, non-speculative data to back it up. We don’t need to merely guess that gun crime in bars will not rise… We know it hasn’t.
It would be nice for one person to say that they were wrong. It wouldn’t have to be a complete capitulation: “I still say in thE long run that crime will rise, but I admit that I was wrong about what would happen this past year.”
As opposed to the reflexive claim that the police and the newspaper reporters and editors conspired to hide the truth, such an admission would be welcome.
And honest.
Aw, what the heck. I was wrong.
Now I didn’t participate in thread, though I did chuckle at Dio’s provocative remarks:
Did anybody else find those 2 lines hilarious? I sure did. But I digress.
Years ago, I thought the CCW experiment would end badly. I was wrong. So I didn’t participate in this thread: I withheld public judgment because I knew that I had been wrong once and the law seemed to apply more to CCW types than hopped up drunken rednecks with impulse control issues. I privately thought that this might end badly… or might not, given the CCW experience. I would not have liked to place a bet on the matter.
Looking forward, I want 4 additional years of data and a real study. I don’t anticipate the general pattern changing… though it could. It just would be nice to nail down the statistical significance and cull out any unanticipated behavioral patterns.
It’s not so much that you were wrong as you didn’t account for the fact that people who go through the trouble of getting permits, thus identifying themselves as gun owners to law enforcement and putting themselves squarely on their radar, rarely commit crimes, let alone crimes with guns. You just heard “guns in bars” and flinched. These things happen.
You have all the data you need. Carrying guns into bars is perfectly legal in Pennsylvania and it’s not even illegal to get drunk while carrying, which is the worst-case scenario that everybody against this is so worried about. It’s been that way for at least as long as I’ve had my permit, which is almost a decade.
We’ve got Measure for Measure who admitted he was wrong and I suspect he will be one of the few. The opponents of CCW laws who cried that Texas, Florida or wherever would end up being the “wild west” were wrong and I haven’t heard many of them admit it. When the facts conflict with ideological belief it is more convenient to ignore them rather than to change ideology.
Actually they flow both ways. There’s another study by the guy who wrote More Guns Less Crime using county-level data. The author shamed himself when he was exposed as a sockpuppet on usenet some years back, and though his work satisfied standard statistical tests, it did not pass the most rigorous ones. But some enterprising researcher could revisit the matter and even extend his dataset – Larger Samples, Sometimes Greater Statistical Significance.
Odesio, Airman: I honestly believed some years back (1990s??) that Florida et al would be wild west due to CCW. So I was more circumspect with this thread. The PA experience is interesting… more data for our hypothetical researcher.
…though I understand that most homicides are believed to be perpetrated by somebody known to the victim. And a bad or impulsive friend or relative could take the gun and fire at somebody in the CCW household. But that’s speculative: the matter deserves more study. Heck it could conceivably be a substantial proportional risk adjustment in the owner’s favor.
As for absolute risks…
Our most lethal threats appear less on TV news shows. They involve weight, exercise, smoking, automobiles and alcohol.
You can add Iowa to that list allowing CCW in bars without any homicides for at least the last 25 years.
According to this paper[sup]1[/sup] , 4 states allow concealed weapons in bars provided the armed person does not consume alcohol.
Permit me to summarize their work. Gun owners are more likely to binge drink, drunk-drive and suffer alcoholism than those who do not own guns. Those who have taken a gun safety course in the past 3 years are normal, neither better nor worse than those not owning firearms.
Now for the details and caveats. A slim majority of people have drank in the last month. But most have not imbibed 5 drinks on a single occasion, drove after drinking “perhaps too much” or put down more than 60 drinks over 30 days, all activities within the past month. So this is a study of jackass likelihood. Jackasses consist of perhaps 2-15% of the general population, depending upon our alcohol abuse metric. Most gun owners are not jackasses. But there are a higher share of jackasses/alcohol abusers within the gun-toting community.
And counter to what I said earlier, those who have attended a gun safety workshop are statistically more likely to engage in abuse of alcohol. But such people are also more likely to be white and male, 2 groups prone to alcohol abuse. And after you control for demographics and location, those who have attended a gun safety workshop are normal, comparable to those who don’t own guns. Thus my original characterization.
From now on I’ll just stick to the results that control for demographics. All comparisons will be to those who don’t own guns. Those who owned a firearm were somewhat more likely to abuse alcohol, while those who just lived in a household with guns were relatively normal. Those who keep guns loaded and unlocked in their house and those who drive in vehicles with loaded firearms are both more likely to drive drunk, by a factor of 3 or more. So much for risk assessment. They are also more likely to put down 60+ drinks a month. Those who carry a firearm for personal protection are more likely to drive drunk, though by a factor of merely two.
Methinks that some (not all) firearm owners need to manage their risks better. We would all be better off.
[sup]1[/sup]“Association between firearm ownership, firearm-related risk and risk reduction behaviours and alcohol-related risk behaviours”, by Garen J Wintemute published in this June’s Injury Prevention (2011). doi:10.1136/ip.2010.031443
As of November 1st of this year add Wisconsin to the list.
As a lawman of almost 30 years I’m speculative that statistically nothing will change. If an armed sober person is not a threat, an armed sober person is simply not a threat, even if others around him/her are not sober.
Can at least one of you Chicken Little’s please explain why an armed sober person who is otherwise not a threat to others is, somehow, a threat when others around him/her may not be sober? Provide statistics, facts, and cites, not delusional “this or that could happen” nonsense. Show me significant data that indicates sober people who are armed cannot safely be around others who are not sober.
According to Handgunlaw.us most states allow carry in “restaurants that serve alcohol”. I’m not sure if that means taverns, or, just as it says, specifically restaurants. I don’t see what the big deal is as to the location one is carrying in. If I have a pistol and I’m not intoxicated myself, what does it matter what those around me are imbibing in? Why is a sober armed person okay to be at McDonalds, but an armed sober person is not okay to be in the corner bar drinking a Diet Sprite?
I believe the concern is that somebody will conceal a weapon on their person, walk in a bar, and succumb to the temptation to start drinking. Or a drunk could grab their weapon and start messing with it. Or a moron could get confused and maintain (wrongly) that concealed guns are allowed in bars, overlooking the CCW permitting aspect.
It appears that this hasn’t been a problem so far. At least inside bars: Bricker didn’t report before and after tavern incidents. Anyway those are some of the concerns.
From 1997-2009, approximately 395,000 people were gunned down in the US. Of these deaths it is probable that over a third involved alcohol. So there is reason for concern, though to be perfectly honest the research in this area isn’t as airtight as we would like.
Cite: Same paper above. It’s a .pdf, so it would be best to google it.
Bricker’s article: Most crimes in taverns involve robbery, or so I would speculate. A real study would need to separate out spontaneous incidents involving brawls and the like, which is where the concerns lie. They would also need to control for more general factors, specifically you want to have a control group. All that said, I’m not predicting anything.
You weren’t the only person to make the wrong call.
But thus far, you are the only one honest enough to admit it, with some perfectly acceptable caveats. Kudos to you.
This is retarded. How would a person, drunk or sober, be able to grab a weapon that was concealed, thus it’s very existence unknown???
:rolleyes:
This would be a good argument for concealed carry as opposed to open carry in bars which was already legal in Virgina per the OP.
Yes, many firearm homicides do involve someone who is intoxicated. But what the report does not show (unless I missed it) is how many involved someone who was legally carrying a firearm in an establishment that serves alcohol and then broke the law by imbibing themselves.
Something to keep in mind here is the fact that there are no bars as such in Virginia. All such establishments, including nightclubs and the like, are restaurants licensed to serve alcohol. All of them must show a reasonable proportion of income from food sales, or the state will shut them down.
The wisdom of that can be endlessly debated, but that is the environment we are dealing with here. The justification that someone is going into an establishment for a meal is a perfectly legitimate one, and the distinction between a restaurant and a bar isn’t much in evidence. The real distinction is between restaurants with licenses for alcohol sales and ones without.
Nice contribution Mr. Moto.
People can spot objects that are imperfectly concealed. Jackasses can know their friend is packing heat and play hilarious jokes. Morons can show their previously concealed gun to strangers, because they think they’re cool. This happened to my brother once – in a jurisdiction with very tough gun control laws. (We vacated and the cops handled the rest. [1]) They call it “Concealed Carry”, not “Romulan Cloaking Device Carry”.
Well to answer the inquiry, the paper showed no such thing nor did it purport to: it was citing other work. There aren’t any studies on the OP’s topic aside from superficial news reports as far as I can tell. So commentary with regards to guns in bars is speculative which is why I referenced reasons for concern as opposed to slam-dunk evidence. My snark aside, you may have noted I have neither challenged nor affirmed your central prediction, and I daresay your life experience makes you better qualified on this subject than I.
[1] We left the establishment not out of fear of guns, but out of concerns regarding drunken morons with pistols.
It’s been four years since the law passed.
So far, the trend is holding steady.
Of course, you said four additional years, so I guess we need to wait until 2015?
But the chances for an explosion of violence seem… small.
Slow day at work, eh?
Or maybe an alarm in the phone or something (but who keeps a phone for 3 years?).
Outlook reminders live forever.
And Exchange ActiveSync syncs Outlook with iPhone’s reminders.
Conversely, who trashes their data every time they get a new phone?
It’s funny how there’s more attention to how I manage to remember to point out past predictions that have not materialized than to the past predictions themselves.
Measure for Measure wasn’t the only one predicting a bad end – in fact, he stepped in after the fact to say both that he made made an incorrect prediction at the time but had kept it to himself. That’s praiseworthy indeed; he could have simply remained silent. Others in this thread who predicted a return to the Wild West were left speculating about a massive coverup and falsification of data by the police and the newspapers to account for the lack of accuracy of their predictions.
I got my Razor in 2005 and finally replaced it with an iPhone in 2012. I expect my iPhone to last until 2017 at least.
Just out of curiosity for those of us wishing to avoid selection bias, do you also keep track of all of the predictions that you yourself has made over the years, and if it turns out that whatever doper you were tracking was right or that you were wrong do you start similar threads on those?