Interesting Comparison: CCW/US Murder Rate

Guns do not kill people, People kill people with guns and...



It saddens me every time I read some idiot blowing off steam stating that we need stricter gun control laws. The fact is, the gun control laws are pretty strict. It is noted that cities with higher crime rates are those with stricter gun control rules. CCW is right to anyone, responsible enough, to utilize for safety and protection. Most citizens in a CCW state are responsible and safe.

I stand up for the 2nd Amendment Rights in our US Constitution. I don't own a gun personally, but have a FOID card, so that if something ever happens to my husband, a responsible citizen and hunter, the guns stay in my possession until I can hand them down to our grandchildren. Along with the passing on of tradition, comes the responsibility of teaching your children proper gun safety and that they are NEVER EVER to touch a gun if they find one laying in the playground or at home, with out an adult's supervision. If a child finds a gun in the playground, it should be brought to an adults attention immediately. I was raised with guns in my family of hunters and sport shooters, and never once did I touch one w/out supervision, nor shoot one, w/out a proper target. It was not a human being, either!

Use your common sense people!

Thank you.

There are too many variables besides CCW to factor in the equation. The mid- to late-1990's saw more incarceration of criminals, leading to a reduction of the number on the streets. Also, we've experienced an aging of the criminal population over the last decade or so, with many criminals growing out of that phase of their lives.

Click to expand...

John Lott is the Einstein of statistics. When he started his study, he realized there are two problems with all previous studies:

1. Cherry picking -- people tended to pick an area where their preconceptions would be borne out by their "study." Lott avoided this by using FBI Uniform Crime Report data for the entire United States (county by county.)

2. Failure to account for variables. With computer technology, Lott incorporate a vast array of variables.

That's why the antis do not directly attack the Lott studies.

I don't think you can show causation between expanded CCW and fewer murders. The end of large high-rise housing projects in cities that concentrated drug violence, increased drug rehab and intervention programs that may have helped stop some criminals from going on to more violent crimes, and a host of others.

What it does show is that the "blood in the streets" arguments from anti-gun folks in relation to ccw legislation and ending the AWB are wrong.

I hate to state the obvious here, but how can any one thing be the cause for the decrease of murders in the US? No one mentioned the assault rifle ban of 1993 or the ban on high capacity magazines. I'm not saying they are the reason for the decrease because, honestly, I don't know. I'm just saying, I doubt if there is just on cause.

I've been wondering what if somebody looked at the % of prohibited possessors killed in a state vs the total number of deaths in that state. My guess is that the states with stricter gun control laws would have a lower % of prohibited possessors killed than states with looser control laws.

This of course is a totally uneducated guess. It'd just be nice to take a look at the statistics

I don't think you can show causation between expanded CCW and fewer murders.

Click to expand...

What statistics shows is correlation, not causation.

What Lott uses is the "Null Hypothesis" which says, "There is no significant correlation between A and B." He then uses a multi-variate Pearson Product-Moment Correlation to show the Nul Hypothesis is rejected. This is a standard technique in many fields of science.

I've been wondering what if somebody looked at the % of prohibited possessors killed in a state vs the total number of deaths in that state. My guess is that the states with stricter gun control laws would have a lower % of prohibited possessors killed than states with looser control laws.

Click to expand...

A practical application of this would be to have the state assume an absolute liability when they deprive citizens of the means of self-defense (which means of course, they are also deprived of a basic civil right.) In other words, we'd tell government, "Okay. You can restrict carry in the Post Office. But if anyone is killed by a criminal inside a Post Office, you pay -- big time."

No one mentioned the assault rifle ban of 1993 or the ban on high capacity magazines. I'm not saying they are the reason for the decrease because, honestly, I don't know.

Click to expand...

If the Assault Weapons Ban had an impact on the crime rate, then the crime rate would be going up ever since the ban expired.

But not even the strongest supporters of the ban claim it had any effect on violent crime at all.

I honestly do not think CCW has anything to do with the downward trending murder rate over the OP's time period.


Rather the part of society that was responsible for most murders saw an increase, and then a decrease in their culture and number of activities.


A very large percentage of murders were gang members killing other gang members.
The years mentioned by the OP include most of the rise of the primarily black gangster culture (that a lot of chicano gangs would later partially adopt as well) and associated gangs, violent gangster rap music, and then the subsequent decrease in overall open violent activity.
This activity increased and then peaked in the late 80s and early 90s most places before seeing a steady decline (although the culture spreading to new areas even after a decline in the original areas held the overall numbers up longer.)


The total number of murders over these years were primarily associated with the gangster culture, and did not even involve the majority of the population.
If you subtract these murders from the total the overall murder rate is much lower, and actually rather steady.
For those living in that culture or in areas with a lot of it the rate was higher than the national average, and for those living in places outside of it the rate was significantly lower than the statistics show.



That CCW just started to be passed in most states around the same period of the decline has nothing to do with the decline.
Just as the Assault Weapon Ban passed around a similar time had nothing to do with the decline.
The decline was due to a decrease in open widespread gang activity, primarily as a result of cracking down on the gang culture (in both constitutional and unconstitutional ways.)

Outside of the gang culture the overall murder rate has not seen as big of a decrease, and in fact violent crime amongst the general population is often actually higher. Girls for example once rarely involved in violent crime are seeing a dramatic increase as perpetrators of violent crime.
This is a sign of society actually getting more violent not less, even as the actual statistical rates of murder and violence technically decrease because of reduce gang activity.

So the dramatic change and reduction in gang activity actually clouds the results.
Outside of the gang culture, violence and violent tendencies amongst the general population of society has actually increased.


So while statistically there is less violent crime and murder, in reality the rate for the average member of society when adjusted to remove the gang related crimes from the overall statistics looks nothing like the overall rate change.

Do you have numbers and cites to back that up?

Do you have numbers and cites to back that up?

Click to expand...

Yes, I can look them up, but it is many different sources and also requires a little deduction and investigation beyond just the numbers.



A place to start would be the murder rate by race (this includes hispanics as white, some statistics differentiate.)
Why is race important? Well the primary increase in the gang culture from 1980-1993 was amongst blacks who make up about 12% of the population (and hispanics, which are a percentage of whites in these statistics).
While the overall gang percentage of non hispanic whites is lower and so has less effect on the overall rates, (though there is some extremely violent non-hispanic white gang members, just a small percent of the overall population.)
The importance of these statistics as it relates to my previous post has little to do with race itself, but rather the culture and percentage of gang members more prevalent within the black community within the OP's time frame.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/race.cfm






As we can see the trend of white murders both as murderers and victims has been decreasing since 1980, at a significantly greater rate than the image alone shows if adjusted for hispanics.
Even the large increase in methamphetamine use and related violence in the 1990s-2000s in no way compared to the increase in violence within the black community from 1980s-1990s, primarily because there was not also the same drastic increase in gangs or the associated culture within such white communities.


( 1996)




Now what changed in the black community (and hispanic, but they are a percentage of the much larger overall white statistics in first images) at around that time?
Poverty rates had not changed significantly. Opportunities didn't decrease, in fact this was the time of so called reverse discrimination with affirmative action and other things that made it easier to be hired or admitted as a qualified black than as another member of the general population.
No, what primarily changed for the black population was the dramatic increase of the gangster culture, along with the introduction of crack cocaine which was also primarily controlled and distributed by warring gang factions.
(The earlier civil rights era saw a dramatic increase in black murders rates along with the rise of various violent groups into the 70s, but then fell back down as seen in the graph until the start of the gang era.)

These gang factions openly wore uniforms in public (specific colors and attires, specific bandannas on or hanging, ) patrolled neighborhoods openly in large numbers on foot while armed, and were shot by and shot at those of enemy gangs that drove into their area. Retaliating back and forth in vehicles and on foot.
Far different than today. Today gang members have a much lower profile, much more underground operations, nowhere near as blatant and open, and don't typically wear the immediately identifying standardized uniforms unique to them anymore (which makes gang profiling harder for law enforcement.) Open warfare is greatly reduced in most of the country.





There is many other sources from different angles.
I began to add some but the post grows tremendously in size.

Suffice to say the gang culture was the bulk of increased crime rates, and that increased gang culture was most prominently seen within certain ethnic groups changing the rates much more drastically within them.
Most of the nation outside of that gang culture actually saw a fairly steady murder rate decrease long before the 90s.
Yet the overall rate continued to rise until then, because it combines everyone into a single rate.

I agree that culture is a key issue in crime.

But that means that for violent crime to come down, it must come down in those segments of the population where it is happening. And that's what your graphs show. What they don't show is why it's coming down. And you haven't done the detailed multi-variate statistical analysis that Lott did.

And you haven't done the detailed multi-variate statistical analysis that Lott did.

Click to expand...

I have analyzed it further than I show in the previous post.
I simply don't wish to invest too much effort in showing CCW which I support had minimal effect on the homicide rate shown by the OP. I also think Lott is an intelligent individual with good credibility and credentials that makes him a valuable asset as a voice for RKBA and don't wish to cast doubt on his work. Most of his work is excellent.



However as the black homicide graph shows the primary loss in overall murders was within populations such as the black community (and hispanic.)
Since as the graph shows the majority of murders committed by blacks was targeting other blacks, and other data shows it was primarily gangs and gang culture...

Consider that many of the targets of gang murders in 1993 were armed gang members. The fact that they were illegally carrying a concealed weapon did little to discourage killing them. Drive-by shootings would even be performed on entire groups of armed individuals.
For CCW to have any effect on blacks killing blacks it would probably involve blacks carrying concealed right?
But to determine that somehow people not discouraged from killing armed enemies suddenly became discouraged because of the presence of a gun amongst some holding a permit...

No, most of the decline in homicide rate was a decline in gang violence. The total number of murders being committed by gangs against other gangs is so dramatically decreased that it has brought the entire overall rate for the nation down noticeably. Even though the overall rate for the population outside of gang violence has changed far less.
While gangs also beat and stabbed people to death with various items, handguns were the primary weapon used.
Since a lot of their victims (also gang members) were illegally armed in 1993, it is contrary to logic to presume that the presence of legal firearms has anything to do with gangs killing fewer enemy gang members, because illegal carrying of firearms by victims was already a variable back then.
Greatly reduced gang violence against other gang members has nothing to do with CCW, yet is the primary change in the homicide rate.
(Not to mention most of the victims of gang homicide that make up those homicide rates are prohibited persons anyways, and wouldn't qualify for a permit. Yet many were still armed when killed.)

However as the black homicide graph shows the primary loss in overall murders was within populations such as the black community (and hispanic.)
Since as the graph shows the majority of murders committed by blacks was targeting other blacks, and other data shows it was primarily gangs and gang culture...

Click to expand...

Obviously something is at work here -- but to say it's one thing and not another would require a detailed multi-variate analysis.

Sorry to disagree with so many of you but I think there is a direct correlation. More guns=good.

""My point to an anti-gun opponent was that CCW makes the country safer....based on what I was depicting. now I need to take those thoughts into consideration as well."" from post #4

I believe the statistic is good -ie more guns less crime.

It is much better than the blabble coming out of the last two--IL & WI--- there will be blood in the streets. That has been disproved a couple dozen times but the LEFTISTS drag it out again.

CCW/US Murder Rate