Florida's crime rate hits a low as gun ownership & concealed carry permits hit record highs
Bottom Line: According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Uniform Crime Report, there were 28,640 fewer crimes in 2017 than the previous year. That's down 4.5% year over year and the overall crime rate was down 6 percent over 2016. That's great progress in a year but it's actually a part of a longer-term trend. In fact, the FDLE report shows that crime has declined year over year for exactly ten years (2008-2017). It's even more remarkable when you consider that we went through the Great Recession in the mist of that streak as well. What's most instructive is the incredible parallel increase in gun ownership at the same time. But first let me walk you back to an excerpt from a story I shared with you in July of last year...
In 1997 the Clinton Justice department found the following:
There were an estimated 1.5 million defensive users of firearms per year
More recently in a separate study published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology conducted by Northwestern University School of Law in-conjunction with Florida State the following was found:
2.5 million law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminal activity per year
That's 6,850 times per day! But those almost never makes the news right? Ignorance can be fixed with more information. In the case of the gun control bigots, the willful ignorance they engage in is dangerous.
Despite those facts that there is documentation demonstrating that thousands of people per day, on average, are able to successfully protect themselves with the defensive use of a firearm, the gun control argument continues. Recently, Florida's Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam advanced the argument that guns save more lives than they take. A new study just published from the Crime Prevention Research Center once again backs the evidence that legal gun owners are, in general, highly responsible and more likely to be law abiding than the average non-legal gun owner.
The research homed in specifically on concealed carry permitted gun owners and demonstrated the following:
6.5% of all adults hold concealed carry permits
A record 16.3 million adults now hold permits
In every state/situation studied concealed carry permitted owners were more law abiding that the average adult
I could actually bore you with a lot of stats (here's a link to the 61-page study if you're inclined): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004915
But the results were once again overwhelming. I didn't calculate all of the stats from all of the examples studied but it appears as though your average concealed carry permit holder was at least 50% less likely to commit a crime. Now to those of us who are gun owners...that's not surprising. To those who are close-minded, devoid of factual information, but driven by irrational fear in the media. Well, you can see once again that the most pervasive form of media bias is omitting information because most likely this is first you've heard of this study.
Now for the updated information and the rest of the story. Florida's crime rate is at a 47 year low. This while Florida's concealed carry permits are at record highs along with gun ownership generally. Florida now leads the country with 1.78 million concealed carry permitted holders. That's 500,000 more than the 2nd closest state! And what's happened over the previous ten years? The same ten years that crime declined every year in our state? A 256% increase in permits. So, here's the question? Who's interested in facts and who's interested in a political agenda? There are two sides to story but one side to facts.