Gun activists are pushing the new Republican-run Congress to get behind nationwide open-carry reciprocity, proposed legislation that would require every state to honor concealed-carry licenses issued by other states. That would allow people with licenses from states with lax gun laws to carry concealed arms anywhere in the country, regardless of the local gun laws. If such a bill became law, it would create a national system of federally mandated concealed carry.

The only trouble is, concealed carry costs us all dearly, in both money and lives.

Idaho universities, for example, have just discovered that they must spend millions of dollars a year to accommodate the state’s new concealed carry law.

And the Violence Policy Center, in a report released in February, documented 722 shooting deaths since May 2007 caused by private citizens who were licensed to carry concealed weapons. In every case documented, the killing had nothing at all to do with self-defense. Because there is no systematic gathering of data on such killings, the center gleaned the information from news reports and notes that the deaths “are only an unknown fraction of the unreported number of similar incidents that routinely occur across the nation.”

Gun nuts argue that allowing people to carry concealed arms anywhere they want, including in schools, churches and state legislatures, enables them to defend themselves and quickly confront threats when the police aren’t around. But statistics show that states with higher rates of gun ownership and weak gun violence prevention laws are not safer but instead have the highest overall gun death rates.

http://www.ceasefireusa.org/blog-entry/hidden-costs-concealed-arms-dollars-and-deaths