Bazaam - I've been looking

Bazaam - I've been looking for this one.

Back during the Senate's final debate on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, Wes Skoglund (Liar, Minneaoplis) along with the likes of Linda Berglin (DFL, Internationale) brought up details of a Violence Policy Center study claiming that Texas concealed carry permit holders were arrested for more crimes, especially violent ones, than non-permit holders.

I wanted to jump to my feet and refute him on the spot, then and there - but that would have violated a number of rules, and gotten me ejected forthwith.

So I couldn't do it there. But I can here:

This "study" is about a year old, and has been debunked frequently.

First: The "study" lists *arrests*. Arrests are, in and of themselves, meaningless in determining the risk to the general population of a concealed carry law - because after ANY homicide, and after most shootings of any kind, an arrest is pretty much standard procedure; the determination that the homicide was justifiable comes AFTERWARD. Example: a woman can shoot someone who charges at her, knife in hand, pants down around knees,
wearing a "Rape Inc." T-shirt - but the police will still arrest her. The key point is, *will she be convicted*? The answer? No - not if it was justifiable. The kicker is, the "Violence Policy Institute" knows that arrests are a meaningless metric. They released this "study" to try to get material out into the Spin Wars on the subject, knowing how many people (and reporters, and legislators) are too misinformed and/or stupid and/or intellectually lazy to know the difference.

But the real kicker here is the actual analysis of the conviction figures provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Read the table. Note the pink column on the far right; any number greater than 1.0 is one where the ratio of convictions, *per capita*, favors carry permit holders.

The overall figures? Texas' 220,000-odd permit-holders are less than a third as likely to commit ANY crime - and if you leave out convictions unrelated to the permits themselves, it's more like one-fourth. Texas permit-holders committed absolutely no robberies or kidnappings. But for one murder (the first in several years), the carry-permittee's record would be as close to spotless as 220,000-odd humans can get.

The simple fact is, the numbers of concealed carry permit-holders that commit crimes are so incredibly low that statistics really aren't useful for much, except to show that there just is no problem!

I may print up copies of this to distribute to stores that display "No Guns" signs.