More gun licenses, more debates

Right to carry concealed weapons revisited

-- The right to carry a concealed weapon in Michigan -- 10 years ago a red-hot topic -- is pretty much uncontested. No one is talking about rolling back the CCW changes of 2001, or enacting new gun restrictions.

But the argument over whether authorizing more people to carry concealed guns was a good idea continues unabated. The number of CCW permit holders has quintupled to nearly 276,000 in Michigan in 10 years. Advocates of gun rights and gun control don't agree on the facts.

"The case is clear," said Dennis Henigan, interim president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "The premise that (so-called 'shall issue' CCW laws) would make you safer is false. Those laws have been an abject failure."

Hardly, counters John Lott, an economist and author of "More Guns, Less Crime."

The number of permit holders committing crimes is tiny, he said. And the evidence that jurisdictions like Michigan with permissive laws experience a lower incidence of violent crime is "pretty overwhelming," he said.

Data inconsistent on CCW's effects on crime, violence

Some of what passes for research and analysis of the effect of permissive concealed weapons laws on crime and violence is pretty crude.

Take, for instance, the anti-gun Violence Policy Center's Web page called "Concealed Carry Killers." ( www.vpc.org/ccwkillers.htm )

It purports to tally the carnage that results when states, such as Michigan, authorize ordinary citizens under most circumstances to be licensed to carry concealed guns.
Concealed carry licensees "routinely" kill cops, perpetrate mass murders and other gun homicides, writes VPC. The center counted 308 "Private Citizens Killed By Concealed Carry Killer" since 2007. A lot of them -- 78 -- were Michiganders.

A closer look at VPC's data doesn't necessarily confirm a CCW crime nightmare scenario. The overwhelming majority of Michigan victims the center cites (62) were licensees who committed suicide. Michigan's concealed weapons law requires the State Police to report annually on deaths by suicide of license holders.

But the reports contain no information about how the licensee died or whether a firearm was involved.

Several other "victims" in the VPC report appear to have been criminals themselves, shot attempting to rob legally armed citizens. But with 276,000 concealed pistol license holders, even the unscrubbed VPC numbers hardly establish evidence of a crime wave.
One of the few pieces of relative consensus about concealed weapons and crime is that licensees, who in most states, including Michigan, undergo background checks and training, tend to be more law-abiding than the adult population at large.

Dennis Henigan of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, no fan of permissive CCW laws, concedes as much.

But on the broader question of whether such laws make the wider society more or less safe, nothing close to consensus exists.

Henigan said Michigan and other states were sold a bill of goods by the National Rifle Association about how criminals would modify their behavior when they couldn't be sure which potential victims were armed.

"Criminals don't act that way," Henigan said, "They're not cowering in fear about running into someone else with a gun. There is blood in the streets."
But has the amount of blood been affected by a change in concealed weapons licensing?

Henigan said academic research nationally shows "no downward effect" on crime rates in jurisdictions with liberal concealed carry regulations. Further, he said, the evidence of an increase in aggravated assaults in such jurisdictions is "very clear." Claims to the contrary, he said, have been "thoroughly debunked."

Not surprisingly, the leading claimant to the contrary, economist John Lott, thoroughly disagrees.

During the past 15 years, more than two dozen peer-reviewed analyses of the effect of right-to-carry laws on crime have been published in academic journals, Lott said.

Sixteen found that concealed carry reduced crime; 10 suggested no discernible impact. None showed crime to have increased in right-to-carry jurisdictions, Lott said.

Lott recently published the third edition of his 1998 book "More Guns, Less Crime," in which he addresses many of the attacks made upon it in the last decade. But the difficulty of sorting the effects of permissive concealed carry from hundreds of other factors (some of them unquantifiable) that affect crime will remain.

Washtenaw County Prosecutor Brian Mackie, who opposed the 2001 CCW reforms, said it has worked out better than he expected. But maybe, he said, that is because changing the law did not change the number of guns on the street as much as it changed the number of people licensed to carry a gun on the street.

"I wonder how many of them actually carry," Mackie said "Hauling a gun around with you everywhere can be a real pain."
Maybe. Just don't look for a consensus on it.
Contact Dawson Bell: 517-372-8661 or dbell@freepress.com

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