On November 30 of last year, the 22 year old shooter of Rep. Gifford and 19 others bought his Glock 19 at a Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson. He passed the cursory federal background check and they sold him the Glock on the spot.

        Turns out Arizona has almost no gun control laws at all. Concealed carry in public is permitted. God forbid that you should solicit a woman for sex- you will serve 15 days mandatory for a first conviction. And there are dedicated LE trying to sting and arrest you. But walk around with a loaded Glock and the police will just smile.

    You can walk into a bar with a loaded Glock; you can drop off your kid at school if the gun is kept in the car but is unloaded. You can carry your gun in most public buildings and apparently carry is prohibited only in a business or doctor’s office.

       And you don’t need a permit to do any of this – once you buy the gun, you can take it anywhere without getting a permit.
These insane gun laws are Arizona’s problem, right? Well no. In 2009, 1637 guns bought in Arizona were found at crime scenes in other states.

       When I posted last month lamenting the need for some comment sense gun laws prohibiting public carry, the learned Board advised me that public carry discourages crime because criminals fearing the public is armed will refrain from commenting crimes. Or, if they did commit such crimes, the honest citizens could at least defend themselves with their own concealed guns.

       Those rationales did not play out too well in this tragedy.

        No one contends that even the most restrictive gun control laws would have prevented this nut from his shooting spree.  He could have bought the gun illegally. But give me a break – you guys should admit that while the Constitution effectively prohibits most gun control laws,  you can’t justify public carry with any kind of meaningful public policy rationale.



-- Modified on 1/10/2011 3:47:53 PM

Ok, so if Arizona were to pass laws banning carrying a concealed weapon, then this guy would be charged with 6 counts of murder, whatever other charges he is facing, AND charges of carrying a concealed weapon.

I bet that would have deterred him. In fact, I'm just sure of it. I can see it now - he is sitting in his home, writing his lunatic rants on the internet, loading the clips he planned to use, and making his preparations, and suddenly it ocurs to him that he might be charged with carrying a concealed weapon. After realizing this, he puts his gun away, and just gives up on the idea. Makes complete sense to me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there is overwhelming evidence that violent crimes tend to be lower in states with the least restrictive gun laws, and higher in states with the most restrictive gun laws. But lets ignore that, shall wel? We'll let a single isolated incident carry more weight than statistics that year after year support the argument that an armed society is a polite society. Yes Chicken Little, the sky is falling. Time to get hysterical.

that violent crimes are deterred by less restrictive gun laws on a nationwide basis, and that is not the proper comparison anyway.
And by hard evidence I mean something other than NRA publicity studies. You can't cite a legitimate study that supports your statement, can you?

     The proper comparison is comparing all firearm caused injuries with restrictive gun laws and the available evidence shows they increase with less restrictive gun laws.

    But aside from the total lack of evidence to support your point, I'll give you credit for nice indignation.

which made perfect sense at a time when you were likely to be eaten by a bear when you went out to get firewood from your backyard, and at a time when it took five minutes to load your rifle and pistols were limited to six shots and not accurate past 30 yards, makes no sense at all in modern times when there is no real need for a citizen to be armed and when arms are so incredibly lethal.

   Yet we are stuck with teh S Ct's literal reading of and inquiries into the founders' intent for this dated provision. Ironically, there are far more laws limiting speech despite the clear language of the First Amendment than there will be limiting gun use under the vague Second Amendment.

has dropped nationwide in recent years and experts are at a loss to explain why. It has dropped in Washington DC which had very strict gun control laws and it dropped in New Hampshire which has very loose gun laws.

     So any NRA "studies" attempting attribute a causal relationship between gun control laws and these statistics is just pure speculation.

   No one contends that every thing the NRA puts out is wrong.

Academic studies that have rejected Lott's conclusions include the following. With the exception of the 2003 study by John J. Donohue, these studies generally contend that there seems to be little or no effect on crime from the passage of license-to-carry laws. Donohue's 2003 study finds an increase in violence.

Jens Ludwig, Do Permissive Concealed-Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime? unpublished draft dated Oct. 8, 1996, on file with Albert Alschuler. Ludwig notes a correlation between PPBF4049 (percent of population black, female, aged 40 to 49) and high crime rates in the data used in the Lott & Mustard crime trends regressions. (This factor is found as a correlation, but is not cited in Lott & Mustard 1997 as a causation.)
Albert Alschuler, Two Guns, Four Guns, Six Guns, More Guns: Does Arming the Public Reduce Crime? Valparaiso U Law Rev. Spring 1997. Alschuler notes that while PPBM2029 (as perpetrators of crime) and PPBF64+ (as victims) are strongly correlated to high homicide rates in the dataset used by Lott & Mustard 1997, PPBF4049 is rated more highly as a predictor of homicide rate. Alschuler notes that Lott supplied him with his copy of Ludwig's 1996 paper as well as the Lott & Mustard data.
Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Concealed Handguns: The Counterfeit Deterrent, 7 The Responsive Community 2 (Spring 1997). Zimring & Hawkins cite recognition of the legitimacy of defensive gun use as an impediment to the socially desirable goal of eliminating private ownership of handguns and set out to criticise Lott & Mustard.
Both Albert Alschuler and Jens Ludwig note a number of problems in their separate papers. Why, for example, should the concentration of older black women in a population predict higher crime rates in the Lott and Mustard model, but not the increased concentration of young men, age 20 to 29, who are vastly more likely to commit such offenses?
David Hemenway, 'Review of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws', New England Journal of Medicine, 1998.[10] Hemenway's review states
Lott finds, for example, that both increasing the rate of unemployment and reducing income reduces the rate of violent crimes and that reducing the number of black women 40 years old or older (who are rarely either perpetrators or victims of murder) substantially reduces murder rates. Indeed, according to Lott's results, getting rid of older black women will lead to a more dramatic reduction in homicide rates than increasing arrest rates or enacting shall-issue laws
Rutgers sociology professor Ted Goertzel stated that "Lott’s massive data set was simply unsuitable for his task", and that he "compar[ed] trends in Idaho and West Virginia and Mississippi with trends in Washington, D.C. and New York City" without proper statistical controls. He alleged that econometric methods (such as the Lott & Mustard RTC study or the Levitt & Donohue abortion study) are susceptible to misuse and can even become junk science. [11]
Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, and John Donohue, Stanford Law School, 'Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis'. Stanford Law Review, 2003.[12]
Jens Ludwig, Georgetown University, "Concealed-Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data", published in International Review of Law and Economics, 1998.[13].
Dan Black and Daniel Nagin, "Do 'Right-to-Carry' Laws Deter Violent Crime?" Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 209-213 (January 1998).
Mark Duggan, University of Chicago, "More Guns, More Crime," National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. W7967, October 2000, later published in Journal of Political Economy.[14]
Steven Levitt, University of Chicago, 'Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not'. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2004.[15] Levitt lists 'Laws allowing a right to carry concealed weapons' as number five in his list of 'Six Factors that Played Little or No Role in the Crime Decline'.
Jeffrey Miron, Boston University, 'Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis'. The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.[16]
Tomislav V. Kovandzic and Thomas B. Marvell, "Right-To-Carry Concealed Firearms and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?" Criminology and Public Policy 2, (2003) pages 363-396.
John J. Donahue III, Stanford Law School, 'The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis', Criminology and Public Policy, 2003.[17]
John Donohue and Ian Ayres. "More Guns, Less Crime Fails Again: The Latest Evidence from 1977 – 2006" Econ Journal Watch 6.2 (2009): 218-238.[18]

I decide to leave, and then there's an attempted political assassination. I guess I know how to call 'em. Well, since our illiterate friend hasn't posted in a while, I guess I'm home free.

Mari, in the news reports that I've read, staffers to the Congresswoman had to wrestle the shooter to the ground. To me, that sounds like a good way to get shot.

If there's any lesson learned in all this, it's that the crazies are coming and Democrats need to be armed. Or, you can get shot in the head. Your choice.

All you have to do is compare the rate of violent crime state by state, and then compare the states with the highest and lowest rates in terms of their gun control laws. The fact that concealed carry laws reduce crime has been proven by looking at violent crime stats repeatedly. Google is your friend.

Here is a link to help you on your way. You'll need to sign up for membership to read the full article, but its worth it. As you can see, it is a non partisan site, and you can find links to opposing arguments supporting gun control as well. Knock yourself out.

This is one issue that I see both sides, although I probably fall closer to the side of allowing people to carry.

Yes, it is true that Nutso was carrying a Glock.  BUt the question is whether outlawing the right to carry would have discourage him.

Someone like this guy will not be deterred.  Likewise, any gun law will not do anything to deter any of my lovely clients.

Since the law won't deter the bad guys, I am not sure how useful it would be for this problem.

Likewise, if a "law abiding citizen" was standing behind him and that person had a gun, it might have saved the tax payers a lot of money on court costs.

On the other hand, some responsible limitations are called for, although I am not sure where they fall.  

People getting shot with handguns is an everyday occurrence in South Chicago.  In fact, it is so common, it hardly makes the news at all.  And the fact guns were once legal, then banned and then not banned has had no significant effect either way.

I think we should have a little electric chair for hand guns.  That way whenever a hand gun commits a crime, we execute the gun in its little electric chair.  It shouldn't be hard to mod a toaster with extra wide bagel slots.  That's a win-win for both sides of politics.

And believe it is sound analysis of available facts, leading to the conclusion that independent of other variables, more guns do in fact mean less crime.

Obviously, other variables can affect that. For example, border states with a high influx of people who flaunt the law in their very crossing will likely have higher rates of certain crimes anyway.

Incidentally, Lott started out as a gun restriction advocate; but the more he dug, the more he discovered that he was wrong. And that book and the studies and analysis were the result of his change in heart brought about by exposure to facts that he resolved in favor of reality to dispel the cognitive dissonance they presented.

Meanwhile, you are all invited to the TER Cafe to share a bottle of Krug with me and GaGambler, courtesy of Mr. Gambler.

Now if I can just figure out how to get off of Priapus's blacklist.

I'll admit it has been a while since I reviewed that literature, but some time ago I did read those studies and reports -- or at least a few of them.

This highlights, for me, mainly, the colossal failure of social sciences generally. Namely, that studies of any sort tend to reflect the biases of those who created the studies.

It reminds me, if you have ever looked at it, of LG's studies. They carry implicit biases in terms of both self-selection and the questions that were -- and most importantly weren't -- asked.

But these studies, even by your own admission, reveal something interesting. Even if we stipulate that the presence of armed persons does not deter crime; by and large these studies you have cited also indicate that it does not INCREASE crime either.

"Anyone who votes for a legislator who introduces gun control legislation -- whether that legislation is enacted or not -- is prohibited from possessing any firearms until that legislator has left office."

(*grin*)

"there is overwhelming evidence that violent crimes tend to be lower in states with the least restrictive gun laws, and higher in states with the most restrictive gun laws."

     I will look at your article but, even if it stands for the proposition you state, (1) you were still wrong about there being overhwhelming evidence - in fact, the overwhelming evidence which I listed in my response to John's post says there is no correlation between gun control and violence levels; and (2) even if violence rates are lower in free gun use states, your article is still making a guess that there is a causal relationship between gun control laws and violence.

      Virtually all experts I have read admit that no one can really figure out the reason for the drop in violent crime rates.

I guess we will have to find another venue. Incidently, I have been saving a bottle of 300th anniversery Krug for a special occasion, unfortunately this doesn't qualify. lol

Welcome back asshole, but you could have at least matched Pri's 8 days. At any rate the first bottle of Krug is on me, I'd invite Pri, but he'd probably try to make mimosas out of my good Krug. lmao

So, what is your drink of choice when you go to
Colombia ? Whisky Sours ?------LMAO !

as for me, I prefer a good whiskey neat, something on the order of Crown Royal, but when in Colombia good rum ron (rum) is easier to find than good whiskey, so I drink as good an aged rum as I can find. Most Colombian bars will serve a Don Medellin that is 7years old and is very drinkable, 12 yrs is tougher to find, but is available at better establishments. No "cuba libres" for me, I prefer my booze neat, Maybe an ice cube or two with Scotch, but no soda pop or fruit juice, it gives me a fucking hangover that you don't get from straight liquor.

I wonder what WW drinks? He probably just drinks his own bong water. lmao

5 of those were just a starting point w/ me-------------hangovers were fucking horrendous .Ahhhh, the follies of youth------LOL!

are obviously drinkers of something less than manly.

Something fruity fellows? LOL

come get some, gagambler the most popular guy on america.jets or pats who you want.