Every Picture Tells A Story, Part Four

I published Every Picture Tells A Story, Part Three last Wednesday. It was an update of the 2011 post that tracked the spread of firearms freedom as evidenced by the growth in shall-issue and constitutional carry. It was released on October 15th to commemorate the effective date of constitutional carry in the state of Maine.

Also published in 2011 was another collaboration with Rob Vance called Every Picture Tells A Story, Part Two which plotted annual FBI violent crime rates against the growth of shall-issue concealed carry. We explicitly stated back then that there wasn’t a positive correlation between violent crime rates and liberalized carry laws. We also said that proving a negative correlation would take more a more rigorous statistical approach. However, we took note of Linoge’s work regarding the negative correlation between crime involving firearms and gun ownership. I would note that Linoge has updated his work and the negative correlation is even stronger in 2015 (-0.8016) than in 2011.

Rob has updated his graph to reflect the changes since 2011 in both crime rates and the growth of shall-issue and constitutional carry.

When Illinois, the fifth largest state in the US, was forced to adopt shall-issue concealed carry, the anti-rights movement predicted blood in the streets of Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois. That is, more blood than is normal in Chicago with its long history of stringent gun control. The graph above normalizes the crime rates as per 100,000. If shall-issue concealed carry would have caused an increase in crime rates in Illinois, it would have shown up in the graph.

Rob notes this about the graph and what it illustrates:

Every time the citizens of our states manage to convince their legislators that individual self-defense via unrestricted or shall issue concealed carry is the best approach, the press repeats the shibboleth that such laws will result in “blood in the streets.” Well, the press has been wrong about that, and they’ve been wrong repeatedly and over many many years. Then again, newspaper circulation is down and this kind of lazy reporting might be one of the reasons why. Violent crime rates, including the murder rates, are down in the United States from a peak in the early 1990’s, but you wouldn’t know it from our press. The diagram below starts with data gathered to demonstrate the change in state laws in favor of no or de minimis regulation of concealed carry of firearms for self-defense (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QxBfs9acTUH8hL1OtkitcivuCzr4IQKjKOQ4_obK61c/pubhtml), and integrates FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data on the national level of violent crime over time.

Concealed carry laws matter because they change the balance of power in the favor of law abiding citizens over violent criminals, increasing both the real and the perceived risk associated with criminal behavior. Over the last 25 plus years the rate of violent crimes in the US has fallen substantially, and this change runs directly counter to the increasing availability of concealed carry as a self-defense option for Americans. We are now experiencing lowered rates of violent crime last seen in the early 1970s and murder rates from the mid-1960s. As John Lott has written (extensively I might add), “More Guns = Less Crime.” Correlation isn’t causality is a truth from statistics; yet it is entirely truthful to say that the normalization of armed self-defense is taking place in a period when the rate of violent crime is falling in the US. Any other conclusion does not follow the data.

Links to our data sources are below:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/17/despite-lower-crime-rates-support-for-gun-rights-increases

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Gaming A Gun Buy-Back

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to waste another $250,000 of the city’s money in order to fund a gun buy-back. He announced his plans yesterday at press conference attended by the usual hanger’s on. The money is coming from the Chicago Police Department’s budget. The “intent” is to “get guns off the street”.

Emanuel’s buy-back will be a partnership between the city and various groups who can apply for grants to fund buy-backs.

Organizations can apply directly to the police department and will be responsible for organizing and advertising the events. Chicago police will staff the buy-back events, recover the guns, and provide cash cards for guns turned in. The $250,000 fund will be used to purchase the cash cards, and is funded through the existing CPD budget.

“Illegal guns drive violence in our neighborhoods, and we must do everything possible to keep them off our streets,” said Superintendent McCarthy. “Our officers already recover more illegal guns than officers in any other city in the country, and this new take on gun buy-backs will help us get even more guns out of our communities.”

The last time the city sponsored such a buy-back gun rights organizations and suburban gun dealers dumped a number of inoperable firearms on the city and collected $100 each in gift cards. John Boch of Guns Saves Lives said the money was used to purchase ammo for a NRA youth camp.

Boch said his group will be back and the cops aren’t happy.

Boch is vowing to return to Chicago with another 50 or 60 guns to turn in.

“We will put that money to good use for public awareness efforts on our part,” he said. “We don’t need gun control, we need crime control.”

Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, said officers will check to see whether turned-in guns are operable but won’t check the IDs of the people who bring them in.

“If people want to game the system, society is the victim,” he said. “I think those people need to ask themselves, are they part of the solution to reduce violence?”

No, what Mr. Guglielmi should be asking is whether this $250,000 of taxpayer’s money couldn’t be better used in enforcement efforts against criminal gangs such as the Gangster Disciples, the Latin Kings, and Black P Stone. When you look at a map of Chicago and see very few areas that don’t have known gang boundaries, it is what I’d be asking.

Our Gun-Owning Neighbors To The North Are In For It

The Liberal Party headed by political legacy Justin Trudeau just ousted the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in nationwide elections yesterday. The Liberal Party took 184 seats out of 338 which gives them a working majority. They will not have to try and form a coalition government with other smaller parties. The Conservatives retain only 99 seats or 29% of the seats in the Canadian Parliament’s House of Commons.

So what does that mean for Canadian gun owners? First, let’s remember that the Conservative government under Stephen Harper did away with the ineffective and outrageously expensive gun registry. Second, there is this from the Liberal Party platform:

We will take action to get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.

Over the last decade, Stephen Harper has steadily weakened our gun laws in ways that make Canadians more vulnerable and communities more dangerous.

We will take pragmatic action to make it harder for criminals to get, and use, handguns and assault weapons. We will:

  • repeal changes made by Bill C-42 that allow restricted and prohibited weapons to be freely transported without a permit, and we will put decision-making about weapons restrictions back in the hands of police, not politicians;
  • provide $100 million each year to the provinces and territories to support guns and gangs police task forces to take illegal guns off our streets and reduce gang violence;
  • modify the membership of the Canadian Firearms Advisory Committee to include knowledgeable law enforcement officers, public health advocates, representatives from women’s groups, and members of the legal community;
  • require enhanced background checks for anyone seeking to purchase a handgun or other restricted firearm;
  • require purchasers of firearms to show a license when they buy a gun, and require all sellers of firearms to confirm that the license is valid before completing the sale;
  • require firearms vendors to keep records of all firearms inventory and sales to assist police in investigating firearms trafficking and other gun crimes;
  • immediately implement the imported gun marking regulations that have been repeatedly delayed by Stephen Harper; and
  • as part of our investment in border infrastructure, invest in technologies to enhance our border guards’ ability to detect and halt illegal guns from the United States entering into Canada.


We will not create a new national long-gun registry to replace the one that has been dismantled.

We will ensure that Canada becomes a party to the international Arms Trade Treaty.

The only thing positive in that list is the claim that a Liberal government will not create a new long-gun registry.

I hate to say it but the next five years are not going to be good ones for Canadian gun owners. Or the rest of Canada for that matter.

Something To Mull Over For A Monday

I read an interesting article by Malcom Gladwell this weekend. It was published in the New Yorker and dealt with how school shootings spread. The central premise is that school shootings are like a riot in that people who may never have considered violence are sucked into it as the violence escalates.

But (Stanford sociologist Mark)Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

His argument has a second implication. We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.

Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?

I suggest reading the whole article. I know this is “heavy” reading for a Monday morning but it is an important topic and it does have an implication for our gun rights.

Hillary’s Cash For Clunker (Guns)

By now, there have been innumerable stories written on Hillary Clinton’s love for the “Australian-style” approach to gun control. Breitbart has it as does The Daily Caller. SayUncle has it as does Sebastian. However, if you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the video. In it Hillary proposes a “cash for clunkers” approach to firearms. Of course, being a good Democrat I’m guessing she would use other people’s money to fund her program.

The NRA doesn’t think much of her proposal.

Hillary Admits Gun Confiscation is ‘Worth Looking At’

Fairfax, Va.— Hillary Clinton said at a New Hampshire Town Hall today that gun confiscation is something “worth looking at.” Discussing the firearms confiscation program in Australia, Clinton admitted she would consider implementing such a system in America.
A voter asked, “Recently, Australia managed to get away, or take away tens of thousands, millions, of handguns. In one year, they were all gone. Can we do that? If we can’t, why can’t we?”

Mrs. Clinton responded by describing Australia’s program, and then said, “I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level, if that could be arranged.”

Chris Cox, executive director of The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, said, “This validates what the NRA has said all along. The real goal of gun control supporters is gun confiscation. Hillary Clinton, echoing President Obama’s recent remarks on the same issue, made that very clear.”

Clinton’s call for gun confiscation follows recent comments she made at a private fundraiser late last month. While expressing support for a ban on commonly owned semi-automatic firearms, Clinton stated her belief that the Supreme Court wrongly held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to self-defense. In her own words: “…the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.”

“Hillary Clinton just doesn’t get it. The NRA’s strength lies in our five million members and the tens of millions of voters who support the Second Amendment,” Cox said. “A majority of Americans support this freedom, and the Supreme Court was absolutely right to hold that the Second Amendment guarantees the fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms. Hillary Clinton’s extreme views are completely out of touch with the American people.”

Even Paul Barrett of Bloomberg News thinks she is making a mistake.

But Clinton may be making a mistake framing her argument in culture-war terms—as a battle against the National Rifle Association, which is a conspiracy-minded extremist group that thrives when under attack. Moreover, while some of her ideas make sense, others, including her emphasis on “assault weapons,” come straight from a tired, ineffective gun-control playbook.

I say let her go full gun control. It worked for President Al Gore. Oh, wait, he lost both his home state of Tennessee and Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas over just this issue. She probably won’t lose New York over this but swing states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvannia will go to her Republican opponent along with the election.

Cutaway Wilson Combat 1911

Wilson Combat made a custom cutaway 1911 for Larry Vickers. In the video below, you can see him shooting it in both full and slow motion.

It is fascinating to watch the ejection begin after the hammer has fallen and the bullet is on its way downrange. This is a well put together video. I’ve watched 2-3 times and I can see myself watching a number of more times. It is only about 3 minutes but is is 3 minutes well spent.

Constitutional Carry And Switchblades?!

I knew yesterday was the first day of constitutional carry in the state of Maine. Rob Vance and I celebrated that with an update to Every Picture Tells A Story.

What I didn’t know and found out this morning it was the first day that switchblades became legal in Maine.

October 15, 2015: Maine’ LD 264, “An Act To Restore the Right To Possess Certain Knives That Are Used by Many Citizens as Tools,” repealing the state’s ban on switchblade (automatic) knives is now in effect. Maine is the ninth state to allow switchblades since Knife Rights started it Sharper Future™ campaign six years ago.

Automatic knives are now legal for civilians without restriction in 28 states, and legal with various restrictions in 10 more. Nine of those 28 states have been added by Knife Rights since 2010. Knife Rights passed the nation’s first repeal of a automatic knife ban in 2010 in New Hampshire and has since passed repeal of automatic knife bans (and repealed other knife restrictions) in Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas. In Oklahoma,this year Knife Rights’ legalized concealed carry of an switchblade (automatic) knife which goes into effect on November 1st.

Seeing both of these efforts pass gives me hope for Maine. They will be inundated with Bloomberg’s money as he and his evil minions try to get a referendum on universal background checks put on the ballot. Mainers are a tough lot and not easily swayed by false emotion. I hope the same will prove true of all the newer in-migrants from places like Massachusetts and New York.

Those Evil Potterfields

Can you believe what those evil Potterfields, Larry and Brenda, have just done? They have actually donated a six-figure sum to their foundation to promote “youth shooting sports”.

Can you imagine that? Wanting kids to learn how to shoot safely, develop a life-long hobby, and be responsible? Why I bet those kids will even pull up their pants and turn their caps around. If I were Ladd Everitt or Josh Horwitz of CSGV, I would be horrified. As it is, all I can say to the Potterfields is …. thank you.

Potterfields Donate $184,000 to Support Youth Shooting Sports

COLUMBIA, MO – October 16, 2015 –

Larry and Brenda Potterfield, owners of MidwayUSA, recently donated $184,045 to the MidwayUSA Foundation to benefit youth shooting sports. This donation stems from the matching program offered by the MidwayUSA Foundation. Donors have the ability to choose the shooting team that will benefit from their donation and Larry and Brenda Potterfield match that donation.

The Potterfields have generously committed to a 1:1 matching program administered by the MidwayUSA Foundation through November, 2015. A donation match is made for all funds returned to Team Endowment Accounts that teams generate from MidwayUSA Foundation promotions. A donation match is also made for all private donations and private donors are given the opportunity to designate a specific shooting team to benefit 100% from their donation. In 2014 the Potterfields’ commitment to the MidwayUSA Foundation match program resulted in the donation of over 4.6 million in matching dollars.

The MidwayUSA Foundation is a public charity working to sustain the shooting sports industry by providing long-term funding to youth shooting teams. Shooting teams with a Team Endowment Account can draw 5% of their account balance each year to use for team expenses. The funds can be used for ammunition, uniforms, entry fees, travel costs and more.

For more information about the MidwayUSA Foundation, Inc. and its Team Endowment Account Program, please visit www.midwayusafoundation.org or call 1-877-375-4570.

Quote Of The Day

The quote of the day has nothing to do with gun rights but everything to do with our feckless (and anti-gun) president. It is from Prof. Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Kagan was formerly a professor of military history at West Point.

There was no meaningful al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan when Barack Obama took office. There will likely be al Qaeda strategic bases there when he leaves. That is failure by any standard.

Every Picture Tells A Story, Part Three

Four years ago Rob Vance and I collaborated on a post showing the progress of concealed carry from 1986 through 2011. The post was anchored by a graphic that showed the growth in shall-issue carry and constitutional carry as a percentage of the United State population. At that time, approximately two-thirds of all Americans lived in a state that allowed either shall-issue or constitutional carry. In other words, shall-issue had become the new normal as it continues to be.

Effective October 15th, Maine becomes the seventh state to have constitutional carry. Rob thought now would be a good time to revisit this advancement of freedom and gun rights. I agree because that two-thirds of all Americans in 2011 has become three-fourths of all Americans in 2015.

As Rob explains:

The sea change in the legal status of concealed carry in the United States described below in graphic form follows a still ongoing grass roots effort at the state level, yet with national implications. There is now a fundamental recognition by the American public that giving advantages to criminals over law-abiding citizens, by means of law, is a logical and moral error. This realization has driven the liberalization of state level laws regarding concealed carry since Florida led the way in the modern era beginning in 1987. Twenty-six years later, Illinois became the last state with a de jure ban on concealed carry – passing “shall issue” legislation allowing legalized concealed carry for its citizens as a result of losing Moore v. Madigan and Shepard v. Madigan in the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals. First permits under the new law were issued in 2014 in that state. The restoration of this fundamental freedom will continue by legislation where we can and by litigation where we cannot.

The two biggest changes shown in the graphic below are the addition of Illinois to the shall-issue column and the growth of constitutional carry from just two small states (Vermont and Alaska) to a total of seven today.

Rob and I are working on an update to Every Picture Tells A Story, Part Two as well as new effort called The Next Wave. This new effort will examine the growth of constitutional carry and its chances in states where it has been introduced but either not passed or vetoed by the governor.

Given that neither Rob nor I believe in hiding our data nor how we put things into categories, you can see it in this appendix.

As of October 15, 2015 here’s the box score in detail state by
state:
Unrestricted Carry States (5.1 %
US population)
Alaska,
Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, Maine (as of 10/15/15), Vermont, and Wyoming
Shall Issue States (67.5 %
US population)
Alabama,
Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska,
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas,
Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin
May Issue States (27 %
US population)
California (some counties are
effectively No Issue, and others are much more permissive), Connecticut (*since
2013 I have accounted this as May Issue, as local conditions have changed from
permissive to much less so), Delaware, District of Columbia (obviously not a
state, but treated as one for this analysis), Maryland, Massachusetts, New
Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island
No Issue State (.4 %
US population)
Hawaii (the legal status of Hawaii
is such that while permits are legally available, none are issued, which is why
it is counted as No Issue in this analysis, rather than fitting into the May
Issue category which it’s legislation warrants).
A word or two on definition of terms used in this analysis/graphic:
UNRESTRICTED: no permit is required
to carry a concealed firearm, aka Constitutional Carry
SHALL ISSUE: permit required but
the state is obligated to issue a permit if the applicant meets certain
criteria (age, no felony record, no drug arrests, etc.); i.e., the state has no
discretion.
MAY ISSUE: permit required but
local authorities (e.g. sheriffs’ offices) have discretion in the form of
requirements above and beyond what the state requires.
NO ISSUE: private citizens are
effectively prohibited from carrying firearms for self-defense outside the home
Find the detail data here:
See also:
Thanks also to Jeff Dege at 
http://www.gun-nuttery.com.