One particular point (point 4) is a load of malarky.
Research has demonstrated that those who obtain concealed carry permits can pose a threat to public safety A Violence Policy Center study found that Texas concealed handgun license holders were arrested for weapon-related offenses at a rate 81% higher than the general population of Texas aged 21 and older (offenses included 279 assaults, 671 unlawfully carrying a weapon, and 172 deadly conduct/discharge of a firearm). Between January 1, 1996 and August 31, 2001, Texas concealed handgun license holders were arrested for 5,314 crimes—including murder, rape, kidnapping and theft.
Students For Concealed Campus Carry
has destroyed this argument.
Perhaps most discrediting of SGFS’s many claims is its citation of a widely discredited 2001 study by the Violence Policy Center, a highly biased gun control advocacy group. The study claims that Texas concealed handgun license holders were arrested for weapon-related offenses at a rate 81% higher than the general population of Texas age 21 and older, between January 1, 1996, and December 31, 2000 (SGFS mistakenly lists the end date as August 31, 2001). This study, which took place during the first five years of Texas’s concealed handgun licensing program, when police officers were not always clear on the new weapons laws and often took a “better safe than sorry” approach to making arrests, focused solely on arrests, not convictions. According to Texas Department of Corrections statistics from that same period of time, Texas concealed handgun license holders were 7.6 times less likely than non-license holders to be arrested for violent crimes (as opposed to the weapons crimes—which can include nonviolent offenses such as attempting to carry a concealed handgun into a federal building—researched by the Violence Policy Center). A four-year study by engineering statistician William E. Sturdevant found that Texas concealed handgun license holders were 5.5 times less likely than non-license holders to be convicted of violent crimes. According to statistics from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Census Bureau, reported by the San Antonio Express-News in September 2000, Texas concealed handgun license holders were 14 times less likely than the non-license holders to commit a crime of any kind and five times less likely to commit a violent crime. The SGFS essay mentions murder as one of the crimes for which Texas concealed handgun license holders were arrested during the course of the VPC study, but the essay fails to mention that in the first ten years of Texas’s concealed handgun licensing program (during which time over a quarter of a million concealed handgun licenses were issued), only eight Texas concealed handgun license holders were convicted of murder. As of January 1, 2007, no Texas concealed handgun license holder had ever been convicted of capital murder. The discrepancy between arrests and convictions is caused, in large part, by the way law enforcement officers respond to a self-defense shooting. If the facts of a self-defense shooting are not immediately evident, a shooter who acted within the letter of the law may still be arrested for murder and held until investigators are able to sort out the sequence of events.