There’s a new study coming out that claims to prove that liberalizing gun laws causes crime. It’s coming to us from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, which is funded by the Joyce Foundation and Mike Bloomberg. This type of study is called an interrupted time series analysis, which you try to analyze the effect of a certain policy by looking at conditions before and after. This is the same kind of analysis that was done by John Lott to support his thesis in “More Guns, Less Crime.” In this case, the local jurisdiction is Missouri, and the policy in question was the 2007 elimination of the permit to purchase handguns.
I can’t comment on the validity of the study, since it is not out yet, and even when it appears in the Journal of Urban Health, I doubt the public will have ready access to it, since we can’t have laypersons peeking into what the priesthood is doing now, can we? But I certainly hope skeptical people will tear it apart and find flaws. The study flies in the face of the very apparent fact that though gun ownership has been increasing, and the number of guns in private hands has been increasing, crime overall has dropped precipitously. How many jurisdictions did they have to study to find one where they could make the numbers support their fore drawn conclusion?
Considering the sponsors that’s not a surprise. I wonder how many people will take this serious?
Merle
Everyone that pushes a GC agenda, MomsDemand, Brady, Everyone who voted for the last round of AWB….
They will latch on and preach it before the elections.
Not many i suppose. But i doubt it’ll make any impact on current state.
I don’t see how this law change would have any impact.
Wouldn’t buyers still need to go through a federal Brady check?
Even a cursory look shows that there’s little possible causation occurring.
More importantly than their attempt to use total homicides (rather than criminal homicides) is that it took a surprising amount of time before the increase happened.
Already demolished. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2249317
Just remember to mention it’s funded by the Joyce Foundation & Bloomturd anytime an anti brings it up. Follow up with, “an additional 20 out of 21 non-partisan studies report the opposite, while the 21st drew no conclusions.”
The law that was repealed was one of the last Jim Crow laws in the nation. It required Missourians to get the permission of their Sheriff before purchasing a handgun.
There is a brief piece at Real Clear Policy discussing this research. The author, Robert VerBruggen, concludes: “The state’s murder rate indeed soared the year after a gun law changed, and there’s no other obvious explanation.” Yet looking at the charts he includes, it seems to me that Missouri’s murder and violent crime rates started going above the national rates around 2004, and spiked in 2008 — rather than “soaring” only after 2007.
He does claim that the additional murders were with firearms, and does show that the rates of other crimes stay flat, but without a more detailed breakdown of how the guns were acquired and the nature of the murder increase (whether there was, say, a growth in gang activity vs. a growth in domestic violence), it’s hard to make much of the data other than it’s a fluke.
A quick look at UCR shows that Missouri’s murder rate is the same now (most recent year being 2012) as it was in 2007. both are 6.5/100K.
Man, that was easier than pushing the “Staples button”.
specific to missouri, there’s an open question about the role of racial discrimination in allowing permits prior to the 2007 change.
We can see that empirically, background checks do in fact increase murder rates. That’s why we have as part of our Constitution that little phrase, “. . . shall not be infringed”.
The Founding Fathers of our nation clearly understood the ill effects of infringement of the right to bear arms, and that is why they absolutely prohibited abrogation of the right to bear arms, not by prohibiting abrogation directly, which would have allowed for infringement, but by absolutely prohibiting even as little as mere infringement of the right.
Government may not so much as touch our right to bear arms, yet it has anyway. That gross injustice needs to be rectified.