CCW and Facts

Nope this isn’t a blog about Credence Clearwater and their magical musical skills. It’s about the continuing mythology that “good people” carrying guns are making our nation safer. The underlying belief, among those who misinterpret the Second Amendment to support the fairly open notion that the right to have guns is a uniform and sacred right for all Americans, is the idea that CCW (carrying concealed weapons) is somehow an answer to our seeming endless theme of innocent death by gun violence.

The exceptionally well-organized and over-funded lobbying arm for gun manufacturers – the National Rifle Association – still believes that the only way to stop a “bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The issue remains that all those gun carriers are “good guys” until they deploy guns in a “bad way.” Problem is we aren’t actually able to predict when that transition is likely to occur. We don’t know when a temper flare or confrontation of any kind will push a “good” person into that “bad” zone. With all those guns out there, it seems to happen every day, and real nut cases can always find a weapon somewhere, often purchased by one of those “good guys.”

One of the leading spokesmen for the beneficial effects of CCW laws is author (More Guns, Less Crime), John Lott, a man who gets an awful lot of air time on sympathetic broadcasters. He cites purported “studies and statistics” that he believes support his premise, and he thinks the media makes too much of those instances when a nutcase shoots someone (or a whole bunch of someones) or where an accidental gun discharge creates another fatality. Gun owner and sometimes Huffington Post contributor Mike Weisser takes Lott head on in a January 13^th editorial.

“Lott's been on this bandwagon about how guns protect us from crime for the past 20 years, and his alleged research is cited again and again by politicians and pro-gun enthusiasts who believe America should be fully armed. The only problem is that not only has his research been debunked by other scholars time and time again, but when a panel of criminologists asked him to furnish his data so that they could replicate his results, at first he couldn't produce any data, and when he was submitted a 'revised' dataset, the subsequent analysis also didn't hold up. But Lott isn't interested in being a scholar; he's promoting the value of owning guns.

“Which is fine as far as it goes. A man has to earn a living, after all. But Lott's one-sided approach not only forces him to make arguments not supported by facts, but also to ignore data which, at the very least, throws the whole notion of CCW for personal defense up for grabs. I am referring here to the ongoing project of the Violence Policy Center to track killings by concealed-carry licensees, which shows that more than 600 people with CCW killed themselves or others since 2007. The study, of course, is based on media reports that have come to the attention of the VPC, so it is necessarily incomplete, and I suspect that in the suicide category, which comprises slightly less than one-third of the shootings, the real number is substantially higher than what is estimated to have really occurred.

“Most disturbing in the VPC report were the 29 mass shootings committed by CCW-legal individuals that resulted in 147 deaths, including 13 suicides by the shooters themselves. What is most concerning about this category is that we all assume that individuals who commit mass shootings are the most deranged and disturbed among us, and it's the gun lobby more than any other group that has vociferously demanded that better screening be put in place to keep mentally-unbalanced individuals from getting their hands on guns. But it's also assumed that when a jurisdiction grants a CCW permit, the scrutiny of that individual's fitness goes beyond a mere background check. The data gathered by the VPC shows this assumption, like many of the assumptions about the value of CCW, to be wrong.”

Since the fact-fearing NRA has managed to get laws passed at both the state and federal level to prevent governmental agencies from collecting and reporting gun homicide statistics – I guess they really know what those numbers will reveal – studies like the above-noted VPC report are all we get to see. Even the Centers for Disease Control have been stopped from gathering this information. So the United States just keeps generating more and more gun homicide numbers – mostly from the continued liberalization of gun laws permitting open carry, assault rifles, limited background checks and oversized magazines – and the gun-sellers’ best friend (the NRA) keeps smiling as they crush any politician with a modicum of common sense and a lot of courage willing to tell the truth. Meanwhile, the rest of the civilized world remains stunned at the crazy gun-toting cowboys in the United States, killing more and more innocents every day.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is a great evil in this land that few have the courage to confront.