Good news for Ohio

[unixronin]

Word has it the Ohio legislature just passed, by a large margin, the state's first CCW bill.  The governor is expected to veto it, and the legislature is confident they have enough votes to override his veto.

The governor's objection?  He wanted journalists to have access to the name and address of every CCW permit holder in the state, in the full knowledge that they intended to publish the list.  How stupid can you get?

Fortunately, it seems the legislature is going to protect Ohioans from their governor's lack of common sense.

Comments

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

One more reason to stay out of Ohio. If the only way they can guarantee public safety is to authorize a bunch of volunteer Rambos to pack concealed heat, they must have one messed-up society.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Gee, thanks SO much for pre-judging all CCW permit holders. Ain't it funny how often people who demand tolerance of their preferences are unwilling to tolerate other people's that they don't share?

For your information, records from every state that has a shall-issue CCW permit law shows that the CCW permit holders you deride as "volunteer Rambos" are not only more law-abiding than NON-carrying citizens, but in some states, more law-abiding than the police. So, sorry'n'all that, but put that in your politically-correct pipe and smoke it.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

You're right: "volunteer Rambos" was out of line.

My main point was/is, I doubt that letting even more people carry concealed lethal weapons is a good way to increase public safety. I think there's an inverse relationship between how civilized a place is and how many guns there are on the street, and Ohio's solons would do better to address the roots of crime.

Increasing the armament in the "War on Crime" resembles the South American Fallacy (so named by a South American general): that there are good people and bad people, and all you have to do to have a healthy society is kill all the bad people.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, [ObDisclaimer] for starters, one can't compare situations in different nations with different cultures -- it's like comparing apples to oranges. (Nevertheless, there's no denying that the "kill all the bad people" idea is a REALLY bad idea ... who gets to decide who is "bad"? And when you've killed all the "bad people", do you move on to the "slightly less bad people"? And where does that end? The Babylon 5 episode "Infection" dealt well with this issue.)

Anyway, that being so, when looking at what works and what doesn't in the US, we have to look at records of what's worked and what hasn't in the US. And when we look at that, the evidence seems to indicate that allowing law-abiding ordinary citizens to go about armed does reduce crime, because the criminals don't know who's armed -- and criminals, as a whole, prefer unarmed victims.

There's an excellent book out on this subject by Professor John R. Lott, Jr, of the University of Chicago. Entitled "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Gun Control Laws", it's been described as "the most rigorously comprehensive data analysis ever done on crime," and is based upon a fully controlled study of county-by-county crime records for the entire US over the past 18 years, among other data. He found a very clear pattern that where gun control laws are strict, crime is high, and where there are few or none, it is low; and, moreover, that changes in the laws -- stricter or less strict -- precede, not follow, corresponding increases or reductions in the crime rate. He concludes that "allowing law-abiding citizens access to legal concealed handguns currently represents the most cost-effective method available for reducing violent crime."

(It's available from many sources including Amazon and University of Chicago Press. It's even possible your local library has a copy.)

What the government is doing right now with the so-called Department of "Homeland Security", on the other hand, follows the "War on Drugs" model pretty closely. The US has lost the war on drugs, has turned it into a war on the American people, and hasn't figured out either of those two things yet. The direction this is going gives me cause for considerable concern. I know a lot of people who are becoming afraid to speak in public fora because of it.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Lott's analysis has been critiqued by Tim Lambert (http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott/more_guns_less_crime/) at the University of New South Wales and pretty well demolished in lawreview.stanford.edu/content/vol55/4/Ayres_Donohue_comment.pdf (http://lawreview.stanford.edu/content/vol55/4/Ayres_Donohue_comment.pdf).

You and I agree completely about the War on [Some] Drugs and the Department of "Homeland Security."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I've seen these ... as far as I've seen, they're the sole dissenting voices. Lott's study is also not the only study to find such a result. I haven't read the entire Ayres-Donahue paper, I'll freely concede; I'm neither a lawyer nor a statistician, and not qualified to judge the strength of their objections.

Studies aside, what can be said is that the rivers of blood in the streets prophecied by organizations like HCI and the Violence policy Center have consistently failed to materialize.

(On the other, I'm reminded of a bumper-sticker I saw once, reading "D.A.R.E to keep the CIA off drugs"...)

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

You and I may have to agree to disagree on this. My personal feeling is that if we have to pack concealed weapons to be safe on the streets, we have problems that are not going to be solved by carrying weapons.

I have a sneaking hunch that in the real world the effects of CCW laws are discernible only to highly-trained statisticians, and even they disagree. Neither rivers of blood, as you said, nor perceptibly-safer streets. Probably the most obvious effects are on the careers of politicians, op-ed writers, and professional activists.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess we will. My personal feeling is that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons after a background check and, in many states, mandatory training, at worst appears to do no harm.

As for the latter, it's certainly inarguable that numerous politicians have ridden gun-control into elected office (and, frankly, that many of them are blatant hypocrites about it when it comes around to what they are allowed to do).