Crime is the most basic of problems. But across the political spectrum we see different strategies.
On the right, the go-to solution has always been to ramp up policing, to make the basic function of the state — crime-fighting — stronger and more effective.
On the left, a leading idea has been to disarm the populace so people cannot do as much harm, and also to “rehabilitate” troubled folks with government TLC.
I grew up in the ’70s, when the failures of benevolent leftism (which we called “liberalism”) were becoming clear. So there was a reaction: Lock more people up.
That reaction fizzled in recent years, and, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, crime on a city-by-city case, as well as nationally, has increased.
Nevertheless, during this period another policy has gained a huge momentum: instead of disarming the populace, arm them!
How’s that going? The most recent case study is in Maine, which in 2015 allowed permit-less concealed carry of firearms.
“While rates of violent crime increased nationally from 2015 to 2020,” writes Steve Robinson in “Maine Crime Fell Following 2015 Repeal of Gun Control Law” (MaineWire, December 29, 2022), “the rate of violent crime in Maine fell steadily beginning in 2015, after a slight increase from 2014 to 2015, according to data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.”
Robinson notes that while the Maine experience doesn’t prove that “an armed society is a polite society,” it falsifies, quite clearly, the catastrophic predictions made by gun control advocates back in 2015.
I hazard it does much more. It shows that distributed power (in this case, firepower and defensive capacity) in the peaceful population is a separate, non-left/non-right solution to the age-old problem of crime.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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8 replies on “Concealed Carry and the Careful Criminal”
Many other countries have a different approach—strict gun laws!
Gun violence and gun laws have played out differently in other countries around the world. One notable example is just across the pond in the U.K.
“The United Kingdom has one of the lowest rates of deaths from gun violence in the world. In 2019, the country had only about .04 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s compared to 3.96 for the U.S. in the same year.”
In other words the U.S. has 99 times the gun death rate of The United Kingdom.
Gun violence is very high in the US. Might note that the rate is almost double in cities run by Democrat administrations. And that those cities with the decades long high gun violence rate have been run by Democrats for those same decades.
Be interesting to figure out which of those is a cause and which an effect. Because if they are linked, that should certainly be made known to the voters.
Pam, what increase in the rate of rape and of other violent assault are you willing to trade for a decrease in gun violence?
I ask because, when the same statistical practices are used in assembling crime statistics for the US and the UK, the UK has much higher rates of all violent crimes except homicide (and rates for all violent crimes including homicide are trending upward).
(To understand the difference in statistics, note that police in the UK do not normally count assaults in which a specific perpetrator cannot be identified, and that no attempt is made to measure unreported crimes.)
For a long span, the various nations of Europe were far more culturally homogeneous than was the US. That homogeneity came at some interesting costs, but also brought a peacefulness that didn’t prevail in America. As nations such as those of Great Britain have become more heterogeneous, they have become not merely more violent, but more violent than America, exactly because they don’t manage heterogeneity as well.
But most of them don’t get that gun-control never really worked, and most of the rest don’t want to admit that they’ve been fools. So gun-control efforts are intensified, knife-control is intensified (because knives are substituted for guns), and bat-control becomes a thing (because cudgels are substituted for knives and for guns), and the rates of violent crime remain dire and worsen.
Again, Pam, how many rapes will you trade for murders?
All these solutions are focused on treating symptoms; constitutional rights in the hands of a gradually increasing immoral fraction of the general population. Because constitutional rights are only suited for a moral populace, said someone smarter than I. Trying to solve the issue by removing constitutional rights doesn’t work, because it disenfranchises the large majority that IS moral while empowering and inherently corrupting the federal unelected as well the unremovable incumbents. Likewise, trying to keep abreast be incarcerating the newly-hatched culturally immoral is a fools errand, since the self-serving politicians have ensured that critical thinking is not part of their offered curriculum and they trumpet good intentions with subsidizing fatherless families while suppressing any focus on the actual horrific results. Growing a permanent, trapped, lawless and immoral underclass that cannot be locked away nearly as fast as they are currently replaced serves those politicians well.
But that is where a feasible solution lies. We really need to stop subsidizing community behavior that dramatically increases the immoral approach to life that is inimical to a healthy community. Not just because it happens to also be unconstitutional. And along the way, it’d be nice to remove from office those that feign surprise over the bad result.
Top-6 deadliest mass shootings in world history:
1. 2017 Egyptian Mosque Attack, 305+ deaths
2. 2015 Kenya College Attack, 148 deaths
3. 2014 Pakistan School Massacre, 141 deaths
4. 2015 Paris Attacks, 130 deaths
5. 2011 Norway Attacks, 67 deaths
6. 2013 Kenya Shopping Mall Attack, 67 deaths
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Note none of these happened in the U.S.
Seems to be an U.S. problem.
“”Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole. The US has 23 times the rate of firearm homicide seen in Australia.
The trend continues for percentage of child deaths caused by firearms. Including physical violence, suicide, and unintentional injury, gun violence accounts for over 7% of deaths in the US among those under age 20, a figure that stands far above peer countries. When excluding infants, who have higher rates of death from neonatal causes, that number jumps to nearly 15%.”
The death rates per 100,000 in the U.S. is led by Republican states. Of the 14 highest rates New Mexico is the only democrat state at 7th. Mississippi is first at 28.6 and Georgia is 14th at 17..7
Other Republican states they have high death rates are LA, WY, MO, AL, AK, AR, SC, TN, MT, OK, KY, WV and GA.
New York is 46th at only 5.3 deaths per 100,000.
Pam, I refer you to my comment above, and again ask what you think to be a suitable cost in increased rapes to lower the rate of gun violence.