Surprise (not really) Concealed carry permit holders are far more law abiding than the average person:
Bottom Line: Of all of the political/ideological debates devoid of any reality and perpetuated by sheer emotion and ignorance - the gun control argument is at the top of the list. In mid June I shared the following:
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.
But despite the fact 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, including boldly advancing the the idea of open-carry in Florida (after passed failed attempts in the state legislature). 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 honed 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.