Shawn Vestal: Think right-to-carry laws have made you safer? Statistics show otherwise.

""A new analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the rates of violent crimes in states after they adopted right-to-carry concealed handgun laws. Researchers modeled crime rates based on what had come before the RTC expansions – in essence creating “synthetic” versions of the states without the changes.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23510
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Two decades ago, the gun lobby’s favorite researcher, John Lott, produced “More Guns, Less Crime,” a comparison of RTC laws and crime rates that claimed to show gun ownership drove down violence. The study was almost immediately followed with great skepticism; the journal that published it reanalyzed the data a year later and concluded there was no basis for the claim, and Lott has gone on to become a figure of controversy in the scientific community. And yet Lott, and his thesis, is still cited constantly by gun absolutists.
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They (the National Bureau of Economic Research) concluded that rates of nonviolent crimes were 13 percent to 15 percent higher in the 10 years after the laws were adopted than they would have been without the RTC expansion. Researchers wrote, “our analysis suggests that had states avoided adoption of RTC laws, they would have experienced greater drops in violent crime. Indeed … while RTC states have now fallen below their violent crime rates of 1977 by about 9 or 10 percent, the states that did not adopt RTC laws enjoyed violent crime drops from the late 1970s of over 40 percent.”

The researchers offer some possible explanations. One is that, believe it or not, permit-holding gun owners sometimes commit crimes with those guns.""

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jul/05/shawn-vestal-think-right-to-carry-laws-have-made-y/

Not only do some law abiding gun owners become criminals the other law abiding gun owners fuel the black market by being too stupid to secure their self defense arsenal. ATF estimates that 600,000 guns are stolen every year, many from cars in states that allow RTC enthusiasts to leave their guns unsecured in the car.

My favorite line? "And yet Lott, and his thesis, is still cited constantly by gun absolutists." See, gunners will believe anything that the gun lobby pukes at them; suppressors save your hearing, AR15s make great hunting rifles, gun laws don't work, guns save lives and my all time favorite THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE OUR GUNS AWAY.