It is the same for Ohio.
In Ohio, many organizations predicted there would be “blood on the streets” if a CCW law was passed. It didn’t happen, of course. Quite the contrary… there are dozens and dozens of examples where CHL holders have protected themselves and others by virtue of having a CCW.
And I vehemently disagree with digs… it is disingenuous, inflammatory, and downright insulting to refer to us CHL holders as “yahoos”. Not sure where that came from. :rolleyes:
Actually, I believe “yahoos” referred to politicians who changed the law.
Of course, if you have a concealed carry, must it stay on your person at all times? I wonder about someone putting it in a jacket pocket and hanging that on a hook in the corner of the room. Guaranteed to go missing sooner or later. Wonder what happens to a teacher who reports to the administration that someone in their class must have stolen his gun? Not to mention personal liability for any result…
Md2000: There’s a lot of responsibility with carrying a CCW. Fortunately the vast majority of CHL holders are mature and responsible enough to carry. A few are not, obviously. Those who are against concealed carry focus on the latter.
Guns and alcohol do seem to be a very, very poor mix. 
In Minnesota, the legal blood alcohol limit while carrying is 0.04, way below even the threshold for driving. Moral of the story: if you know you’re going to get pickled, don’t carry.
And unfortunately, the cranks and nuts at the far end of the bell curve are going to be the first in line to obtain guns. Which is why pro-gun people support ordinary average people getting permits.
Well, not all. I do not believe a person must first obtain a license or permit in order to legally carry a concealed weapon. I believe it is a right.
Point taken; but “Constitutional Carry” is something we’ll see when 50% of the population routinely carries instead of 2-3%. At least “Shall Issue” finally became the standard for most of the US.
Good moral. Here’s another: if you have anger management or impulse control problems don’t carry. If you are bad at self-assessment, don’t carry: you might have alcohol, anger management or impulse control issues. If you are a personality that gets defensive easily, you may be bad at self-assessment. All of this applies to the OP’s concerns.
But there’s something missing here: you haven’t done the cost benefit analysis. Sure, NRA magazines are packed with anecdotes of Joseph-Robert waving a gun and causing Scary Bad Person to flee. But guess what? The bad guy might have run away anyway. That happened just next door to me: a guy was climbing through an open window at 6AM. A female in her twenties staggered into her kitchen and looked at him curiously. He smiled, waved and ran off. If she had a gun I would guarantee that the story would merit an inclusion into one of the NRA’s monthly propaganda columns.
Nor have you considered the alternatives which involve cell phones, self defense classes, etc. Finally, there is the possibility of faulty risk assessment: those owning guns are more likely to drive drunk, for example. Our most dangerous threats come from unhealthy foods, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and failure to wear a seat belt.
At the same time I haven’t presented a C/B either. So while I can exclude certain interpretations involving a noble, patriotic CCW population (tentatively falsified by evidence - the US CCW crowd seems to have a higher kill ratio than the UK and France, both which have nontrivial criminal populations), I can’t go further than that. So I won’t.
You do realize that you compared the murder rate of those countries with the stats from the VPC which included accidents and suicides, right? Plus a large number of those cases are listed as “pending”, meaning that in some of the cases, perhaps many, the CCW holder may have been involved in a justifiable homicide.
Why don’t you compare the “convicted” CCW murder rate from the VPC with the murder rate of those countries you picked?
Excellent point. In fact I said as much in my original point, but amplification is appropriate. I also noted biases working in the other direction: the deaths were presumably underestimated and the numerator was overestimated.
Because doing this analysis right would require weeks of work and coding.[1] And even then there would be problems. Still, an enterprising criminologist has some decent material to work with at the VBC. [2]
Methodologically though, I’m still highly dubious about the upstanding/awesome CCW claim: for that I’d want to see a kill rate of 0.20 per 100,000 instead of something a lot higher. Anecdotes about cop-killing white supremacist CCW holders don’t help either. And recall there’s the support of Garen J Wintemute’s study [4], if you think that taking a gun safety course proxies for CCW. That would be a conservative assumption, since I understand in many states CCW permits are issued like candy, and therefore requires less effort on the part of responsible gun consumer than attending courses.
But to be clear, I cannot and do not rule out the, “CCW-people are normal” hypothesis. Gun owners who have not attended a gun safety course in the past 3 years are another matter. Wintemute showed that this population has a higher share of alcoholics, drunk drivers, and binge drinkers, though he did not use those labels. And we’re comparing shares that are well under 50% of course.
[1] …unless there’s a dataset at the VBC website. What I found was ~4 numbers and pdf links to case studies numbering in the low hundreds.
[2] A criminologist could distinguish between permits in shall issue states and areas where more hoops must be jumped. It’s conceivable that CCW+ (or CCW++) holders are awesome while shall issue ones are normal or even sub-normal, more likely to be involved with mayhem, mayhem defined as shootings, suicides, accidents, etc.
[4] Association between firearm ownership, firearm-related risk and risk reduction behaviours and alcohol-related risk behaviours 2011. It reported that the population of gun owners who had taken a gun safety course had an incidence of various alcohol related risk behaviors that were statistically indistinguishable from the those who did not own firearms. Not superior to. Indistinguishable from. (For drunk driving and binge drinking the share was higher; for drinking more than 60 drinks in the past month, the share was lower). This is after controlling for demographics - if you don’t do that those taking gun courses are more risk-prone than those who don’t own firearms in all categories.
Just to make sure you’re clear, “shall issue” means a permit must be issued if the applicant passes the legal barriers( background, written/shooting test, etc) for a permit. In “may issue” states, you can pass everything with flying colors and still be denied because the issuing authority(usually the Sheriff) doesn’t want to issue a permit to anyone.
Can you provide a cite for the part I bolded? It seems contradictory to me. How were CCW permit holders able to “protect themselves” without “blood on the streets”? Were they pistol-whipping people?
Go read the works of the criminologist John Lott for more, but according to him and others, violent acts have been stopped by the mere display or brandishing of a firearm.
I am not advocating that you do this yourself; every resource I’ve looked at for legal carry of a concealed pistol advocates that you don’t present the weapon unless you’re going to use it. I am just repeating Mr. Lott’s claim. (Which has come under considerable scrutiny and criticism.) Google for more. From the wiki:
70-80% still strikes me as awfully damned high. But there you are.
I wouldn’t rely on Lott alone. Scholars have attempted to replicate that 98% figure using Lott’s dataset without success. True, they still get pretty high figures (~92%) but the fact that nobody can replicate his work speaks poorly of his quality control. And there are serious methodological issues distinguishing between cases where a firearm makes a difference and when it does not as I stated above: surveying ~1000 people while they’re cooking dinner seems unlikely to get at the underlying issue. And Tim Lambert of the University of South Wales maintains:
Furthermore, brandishing a weapon can potentially result in assault charges, depending on jury, jurisdiction and conduct.
runner pat: Thanks! I confess I don’t know the ins and outs of this issue, so clarification is always welcome.
BTW, the law was amended/repealed this year to prevent such insanity from occurring again.
Correction: it was amended on April 19, 2010, Senate Bill 381.
I don’t have any statistics on conceal carry people going off the deep end and using their weapon out of anger…but i had a question…
You say this guy has a temper. I don’t know what your state requires but when my husband got his conceal carry permit in maryland he had to go through a truly long and intense process to obtain it. One of the requirements was giving phone numbers of coworkers and family members to a police officer who conducted interviews with those people about my husband’s character…questions like “how would you describe dr.smiths temperament?” “would you say he’s quick to anger?” “have you ever been in a verbal disagreement with dr.smith,what was the outcome of that?” “would you consider dr.smith a calm person or an exciteable person?”
i was told that if more than 2 of the people interviewed mentioned anything about a bad temper or lashing out then my husband wouldn’t have been approved. obviously, the answers were confidential so the applicant wouldn’t know which person gave him a bad reference.
Is there anyway to get hold of someone in the licensing board to give an off the record character reference of some sort??
and…im pretty sure he can’t take a gun into a school.