Category Archives: Concealed Carry

Reducing Rampages

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Stopping madmen with guns is – statistically speaking – best solved by people, not police, and people with guns. Rampage killings (which include all the common varieties of incidents where a lot of people are murdered, be it mass public shootings, active shooter events, spree killings, etc.) are what scares voters. Most people know and avoid rough neighborhoods. They also choose friends and mates wisely. This keeps mayhem low, evidenced by the fact most gun crime is isolated in a tiny number of towns with big city gang infestations. It is the random odds of dying in a rampage shooting that spooks folks. One fellow decided to see what keeps the most people alive in such incidents, and discovered citizens – especially armed citizens – are the most effective, and vastly more so than cops (see the section below on methodology, data quality, etc.). Survival is the objective The researcher … Continue reading →

Campus Carry, Not Scary

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Why does California State Senator Lois Wolk choose to be ignorant? With her representing a college town you would hope otherwise. Wolk is campaigning to largely prevent the few folks with California concealed carry licenses (CCW) from exercising the right on campuses (the bill as currently drafted, subject to change no doubt, leaves it up to schools to set policy). Ignoring how this creates legal jeopardy for CCW holders unaware of shifting restrictions from place to place, the bigger question is “why?” The empirical data does not support the need to discriminate as Wolk wants to do. In our recent Non-Brady State Scorecard report (ED: alas, no longer being published), we discovered that states that allow CCW holders to carry on campuses, both K12 public schools and college campuses, had significantly lower

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Permitless Carry

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Five states require no permit to carry a concealed handgun in public. Twenty more are considering it. Needless to say the gun control industry is apoplectic. They are riled as they have not been since states started following Florida’s lead and passing shall-issue, permitted concealed carry throughout the 1990s. Back then the gun control industry said permitted concealed carry was a terrible idea, and watched as violence rates dropped nationwide. Today they think permitless (constitutional) carry is a bad idea. For them it is a bad idea, because it is proving to be a non-problem. Currently four states have had permitless concealed carry laws enacted long enough to see what, if any, effect it might have in terms of violent crime. Kansas just passed their permitless carry legislation, so it is too soon to see if tornados kill more folks in Kansas than people packing pieces. Arkansas’ permitless carry law … Continue reading →

Negligent Discharge and CCWs

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A Gun Facts fan asked what we know about concealed carry licencees and negligent discharges (accidental discharges). Frankly, there isn’t much out there. I wish there were concise statistics on this subject, but such events are rare enough that nobody in government, criminology or epidemiology finds it worth the trouble to investigate. The best we can do is triangulate some other numbers.  a) According to the CDC, in the most recent reporting year, there were 606 accidental firearm deaths. Not all of these were really accidents and not all were negligent discharges. There is no breakdown, but Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns cites one set of studies (investigative reports by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company) that note most accidental gun deaths were due to dumb behavior (not negligent discharge) – people drunk, playing with guns, walking into a hunter’s line of fire, etc. b) There are about 11 million CCW holders in the … Continue reading →