Someday I’m going to figure out where the “cops are well-trained” meme comes from, because you folks sure don’t know the kinds of central PA cops I know.
Like any other job, you get good ones and bad ones, and ones that practice and do refresher training and ones that do their minimum-competency tests once a year and then forget about it.
Well, if I saw a mom at a soccer game with a prominently-displayed gun, my worry certainly wouldn’t be that she worked for Stringer Bell. My worry would be that she might commit a crime of passion: shoot the slut who’s been sleeping with her husband, wave the gun in the ref’s face after a questionable call, that sort of thing. This wouldn’t be a big worry, certainly, but that’s the kind of crime that would seem most likely that she’d commit. And again I wonder what the stats are on this kind of thing, and whether folks who commit such crimes tend to be law-abiding in their gun-carrying up to the moment of the crime.
Daniel
LHOD,
Nobody is a criminal until the moment he commits a crime.
Ok, I’ll ask. Why would you think someone, who is most likely a parent of one of the kids out there, would do the acts that you mention? Why do you feel that someone, who in the case of our soccer mom, was upstanding enough to qualify for concealed carry privileges by her local fuzz, would put a gun in her hand and go nucking futs? Seriously, what do you think carrying does to someone to even think that? I can’t tell if you are being serious or being an ass. Which is it? Show me a cite that shows legally carrying people are committing the crimes in your fantasy world. I’ll give you several that show the exact opposite of course.
Honestly, reading some of these comments would lead one to believe that those of us who happen to own a gun are one laser pointer, blown call by a referee, traffic accident, a mean look or inappropriate comment away from going fucking postal, simply because we might be carrying. Do you honestly, logically believe that or are you just having fun on the day before all things turkey?
Hear, hear!
This.
I have read that on average, a ccw permit holder will engage in more firearm training than law enforcement officers. Some because they are very aware of the severity of the responsibility of carrying and of the consequences of actually firing their weapon, whether justified or not. And others just because they enjoy target shooting. Of course, many of them are shoulder to shoulder with LEOs that head out to the range every weekend. And at the other end of the scale are the permit holders that have shot maybe one box of ammo and the officers that shoot just enough to maintain their qualifications. But the average stated that ccw holders spend more time practicing.
My google-fu fails me at the moment so I’m unable to provide a cite. I will continue to look though.
Reread what you quoted, especially the beginning of sentence 3. If that’s not enough, read in context. You’re totally misunderstanding what I’m saying.
Scumpup, what you said about nobody’s a criminal until they commit a crime isn’t something that seems very relevant. Of course that’s true. My question is specifically about the stats on how few crimes are committed by law-abiding gun carriers. What does that mean? Does it mean that few crimes are committed by repeat offenders (i.e., that people are law-abiding until they commit the crime)? Does “law-abiding” refer to their possession of the gun? If the latter, what you said isn’t relevant: my question is about, again, “whether folks who commit such crimes tend to be law-abiding in their gun-carrying up to the moment of the crime.”
Daniel
I think he’s talking about CCW license holders, who are easy to find stats on because most jurisdictions publish the number of folks who violate the law and have revocations. I did a lot of research for Cecil on this to help him with his handgun column recently, and found that depending upon the State, CCW holders were less than 1 in 4 to 1 in 10 times as likely to commit a felony as the average person. And unlawful shootings by CCW holders were very rare, to the point of being statistical outliers in some States (IIRC Kansas has not yet had a single one).
Note however that CCW holders are a special group, in that they generally have exhibited a lifetime of non-criminal behavior and have this proven via multiple background checks. They also have checks for mental illness and history thereof, practical and written training, legal training, and generally are middle to higher income folks. IIRC the stats show that the average CCW holder has at least a junior college education and is in the top 50% of household income brackets - again, two groups which generally are lower-risk from a crime standpoint.
In short, statistically speaking, from a crime standpoint you are much safer around a group of armed CCW holders than any random group of the populace.
Thanks, una–that pretty clearly answers my question that I’ve been trying to get answered.
However, it’s clear that it has no bearing at all on what’s being discussed, that is, whether it’s rational to be alarmed at the sight of someone who’s carrying openly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but CCW license holders are likely to be carrying concealed weapons, not open weapons, right?
And if you find out that someone is carrying a concealed weapon (maybe you see the weapon when their shirt moves or something), knowing stats about how law-abiding CCW license holders are is similarly unhelpful, since there’s no way to tell whether this CW carrier is a CCW license holder.
Lemme try to ask this more clearly: how much, if any, additional wariness (i.e., above what you’d have about any random schmoe) is rational when confronted with a non-uniformed stranger who’s openly wearing a holstered firearm?
Daniel
First, let me break from some of my other pro-gun proponents here and say that simply because of the unusualness of it, IMO it’s not irrational to be wary when suddenly confronted with a plainclothes person openly carrying a holstered firearm. Society has had it beaten into it for so long by anti-gun propaganda in the news media, print, television, and movies - that anyone carrying a gun who isn’t a cop is a bad guy - that I understand the gut reaction. And it’s not just recently; I believe it’s probably been more than 100 years since it was common to see a plainclothes person with an openly holstered firearm in most metropolitan areas.
And in some (I can’t say “most” because I do not have the facts) jurisdictions, concealed carry does not give a right to open carry. And then you have States like Kansas - where concealed carry gives a non-usurpable right throughout the State, and the State has codified an open carry law - but the open carry portion can be usurped at any time by any lesser jurisdiction. And then you can add to this a general layer of police department policies, such as Overland Park, which has a policy of detaining anyone exercising open carry with “possibly disturbing the peace.” It’s sadly very confusing to even CCW holders when they may or may not carry openly in Kansas.
True - in that case, however, you have to judge the situation. Has the person had their shirt ride up reaching for a can in a supermarket aisle? Are you seeing it when they’re bending over to pick up a bag of leaves on their lawn? Or are you seeing it in a seedy bar late night downtown?
I have no stats to back this up, but here’s my take - it’s all about the situation. Clearly there are times when you should or should not be worried. Two things I’ll share that I picked up during my research (sorry, I have no cites, they were the results of talking to police). First, criminals rarely use holsters at all. The reason is that a holster is a very secure method of safely securing a gun to your person, and if a criminal needs to get rid of a gun, they want to toss it out the window or dump it while running, and don’t have the time to struggle out of a shoulder rig harness, unloop their belt, or remove an ankle holster. They want a fast way to dispose of the gun, and the most common places they tend to carry on their person is in the large pockets of cargo pants, or in the front pockets of a jacket.
The second thing I learned was that criminals almost always hide the gun until they are committing the crime, for the very reason that showing the gun sends out an aircraft emergency flare of WARNING - PERSON WITH GUN - MAYBE SOMEONE SHOULD CALL THE POLICE?
Ironically, IMO, this means that if you see a person with an openly carried holstered weapon, they’re more likely to not be a criminal, but rather a person who’s carrying like that for convenience*, or else carrying openly for some sort of intimidation point. Now of course this means that criminals could start doing a double-bluff and carrying holstered openly, but I really doubt that.
Thanks–this is a very helpful post, and is what I was getting at in post 114 (that one should maybe have less rational fear of an open carrier than of someone who’s not carrying).
I’m also getting the impression that open carry is so rare now that it’s hard to find stats on it. I suspect that the crimes committed by open carriers tend to be less planned and more spontaneous, less “I’m tracking down that bastard and killing him” and more “Holy shit, he looks dangerous, lemme kill him!” variety. But again, if it’s really rare, it may be nearly impossible to gather such stats.
Daniel
Let me clarify one point, before someone picks on it - when I say that criminals wouldn’t use a holster because they couldn’t throw the gun away quickly and easily, I mean that they would also have to get rid of the holster, because being stopped by the police after a robbery in the area, and wearing a conspicuously empty holster would invite questions…such as “where’s the gun?”
I suppose too one could have a simple pancake or clip-on holster, which could be tossed away easily. Again, the police I talked to did not feel like this was very likely.
Maybe she was hoping the other team would leave and her kids team would win by default.
To hold up their pants? Or maybe that’s firemen and red suspenders. To get to the other side?
My bias is that someone who sees the need to carry a gun with them everywhere they go (unless they carry large sums of money, etc.) is mentally unstable in some manner. It is just way out of my community’s norm. I’d feel the same way about someone hanging a Bowie knife on his belt when not camping or wearing a clown nose.
I noticed a lot of the supporters tossing around the “fear” word. “Why are you scared of someone carrying a gun”.
Fear is what causes you to carry a gun, not your support of the second amendment.
Someone at a 6 year olds soccer game feels the need to openly carry a gun. It makes you wonder why. Does she know something we don’t? It she planning on shooting somebody? Does she want her kid to get the calls?
Most people would feel it was unnecessary. An open gun is intimidating. You have to wonder why she feels she needs it. There are crazy people who shoot others. is she one of them?
Sorry, cite? Or is this just your opinion? Because my opinion is that anyone who values mere money over their own safety is a bit unbalanced.
What community are you speaking of? Many states have CCW laws and have many people who carry every day with or without large sums of cash. Personally, no amount of cash is worth more than my life or that of my kids so I see no such limit as to when I carry.
So, lets get personal. I carry almost every day. What is my major malfunction? My local sheriff says I can carry AND that I don’t need to justify it by carrying cash or anything else. Do I have a clinical disorder and you know better than my local law enforcement, or are you playing amateur shrink?
So she is likely carrying large amounts of cash to the soccer games and needs it for safety. I understand now.
Actually what Dan said is that she is unstable unless she is carrying large amounts of cash to the game.