{"id":80781,"date":"2022-05-06T05:00:53","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80781"},"modified":"2022-05-06T05:00:53","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T10:00:53","slug":"80781","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=80781","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

While I don’t agree with the premise that possession stats should be publicized, the fact that ‘more guns’ means ‘more safety’ is undeniable.<\/p>\n

More guns, more safety<\/a><\/p>\n

Late in 2008, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a leading Tennessee newspaper, unleashed a whirlwind of controversy when it decided to publish a database of all state residents with permits to carry handguns. The information was already available through the Tennessee Department of Safety, but the state website wasn\u2019t especially user-friendly.<\/p>\n

With the publication of the newspaper database, however, it became easy to search for people with gun-carry permits by name, ZIP code, or city. For a while, the database was the most viewed item on the newspaper’s website, with more than 65,000 page views per day.<\/p>\n

Firearms owners and their advocates were furious, as\u00a0WMC-TV reported at the time<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Some Mid-South gun owners are outraged over a website that lists handgun carry permits, claiming the site gives away too much personal information.<\/p>\n

Tom Givens, who runs the Range Master pistol range, said the database, published by the Commercial Appeal, has many of his clients upset.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst, it\u2019s an invasion of privacy,\u201d Givens said.<\/p>\n

Using the database, a visitor to the website can look up the name of anyone who has a permit to carry a hand gun in the state of Tennessee.\u00a0 Information listed includes the owner’s year of birth, along with his or her city, state, and ZIP code of residence.<\/p>\n

Givens said his phone has been ringing off the hook from clients upset about their personal information being so accessible.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy publishing this database your employers, your co-workers, church members, even relatives that may not know you have a permit, now know that you’ve got one,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On gun owners\u2019 message boards,\u00a0complaints abounded<\/a>. A common concern was that residents with carry permits would be put at particular risk, since the paper\u2019s database enabled any would-be thief looking for a gun to steal to know exactly where to find them. \u201cI’m not happy about it at all,\u201d fumed one resident\u00a0on the City-Data web forum<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I’m not a criminal \u2014 just a law-biding citizen who has a clean background and has undergone background checks in order to exercise my right to protect myself from all the thugs in this world. I could see the database used to \u201cshop\u201d for homeowners to rob who probably have guns in the house. I see no legitimate reason to have this information online other than to demonize permit holders in some way.<\/p>\n

The National Rifle Association\u2019s CEO and executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, denounced the Commercial Appeal for engaging in what he called a \u201chateful, shameful form of public irresponsibility.\u201d Added another NRA official: \u201cWhat they\u2019ve done is give criminals a lighted pathway to [burglarize] the homes of gun owners.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the paper\u2019s editor, Chris Peck, argued that newspapers should be a comprehensive source for community information, and that it was neither illegal nor unethical for the Commercial Appeal to make public records more accessible to the public. In fact, he pointed out in\u00a0a lengthy column<\/a>, the Commercial Appeal\u00a0eliminated\u00a0<\/i>street addresses and birth dates from the Department of Safety data it published. That meant that the \u201cposted list of permit holders for concealed weapons has less information about individuals than the phone book, your voter registration form, or the credit card you use to buy dinner at a restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the potential danger to gun owners from burglars looking for weapons to steal, Peck turned that argument on its head:<\/p>\n

Think about it for a minute. Many, if not most, households in Memphis possess a firearm. So you don’t really need a list to find a house with a gun.<\/p>\n

And, if criminals were checking the permit-to-carry list before picking a target, would they likely choose a house where they know the owner could be carrying a gun, or would they more likely steer away from that house to avoid a possible confrontation?<\/p>\n

Neither logic nor common sense is carrying the day on this issue. It’s emotion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Peck went on to explain why, in his view, there was \u201ca powerful case to be made both for a permitting process to carry concealed weapons and for keeping that permitting process public.\u201d The Commercial Appeal, he insisted, \u201cisn’t anti-gun\u201d but \u201cpro-news and -information.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought it was a good column, though I doubt it changed the minds of LaPierre and the gun owners who were certain the Commercial Appeal\u2019s reasons for publishing the database weren\u2019t benign. I\u2019d guess, too, that they didn\u2019t buy Peck\u2019s contention that, far from endangering them, the database would lead criminals to\u00a0avoid<\/i>\u00a0their homes.<\/p>\n

But now we know: He was right.<\/p>\n

After Memphis-area gun permit data was published, districts where more residents were licensed to carry saw a decrease in crime.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

That is the conclusion of a National Bureau of Economic Research study just published by\u00a0Alessandro Acquisti<\/a>, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and\u00a0Catherine Tucker\u00a0<\/a>, a professor of management science and marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their paper, \u201cGuns, Privacy, and Crime<\/a>,\u201d attempted to answer Peck\u2019s rhetorical question, \u201cusing detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for Memphis and nearby areas, from before and after the newspaper\u2019s publication of the permits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their findings were pretty conclusive: \u201cWe find that burglaries increased in ZIP codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.\u201d Specifically, in ZIP codes with the largest number of residents who had permits to carry firearms, the number of burglaries fell by 18 percent. That decrease took place even as burglaries were going up throughout the entire region covered by the database.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, Acquisti and Tucker wrote, \u201cburglars may have been deterred from burglarizing houses in higher-gun-permit ZIP codes, their crimes being displaced to ZIP codes with fewer guns.\u201d They added:<\/p>\n

ZIP codes with the highest concentration of permits experienced roughly 1.9 fewer burglaries per week\/per ZIP code in the 15 weeks following the publicizing of the database, and those with the lowest concentration experienced on average 1.4 more burglaries. Given that, on average, there were 9.7 burglaries per week in each of the top ZIP codes, our results imply a 20 percent relative decrease of burglaries in those ZIP codes. This finding supports the hypothesis of a relatively small but significant group of burglars [taking note of] the publication of the database and being affected by it.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In their paper, the scholars lay out quite a bit of math and regression analysis and they are careful to qualify their findings where appropriate. Doubtless there are nuances and shades of gray that other scholars can follow up on. My own takeaway is that the obvious has been reconfirmed: Criminals prefer to avoid targeting victims who they suspect may be armed. If you\u2019re a burglar looking to break into a home, you are more likely \u2014 as the Commercial Appeal\u2019s editor put it \u2014 to \u201csteer away\u201d from houses or neighborhoods where you might run into more resistance.<\/div>\n

The same is true of premeditated homicide, which may explain why so many mass shootings have taken place in gun-free zones, such as public schools, college campuses \u2014 even, paradoxically,\u00a0military bases<\/a>. In the wake of terrible massacres in synagogues and churches, a number of houses of worship now post notices specifying that\u00a0they are\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0gun-free zones<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Much of the debate in this country over gun ownership and gun control pits two camps against each other: those who are convinced that more guns must lead to more crime vs. those who see lawful gun ownership as an effective bulwark\u00a0against<\/i>\u00a0crime. To my mind, the data strongly support the more-guns-less-crime analysis. When Massachusetts in 1998 enacted what was widely described as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country, advocates confidently predicted that the Commonwealth would enjoy a significant drop in gun-related crime.\u00a0That wasn\u2019t how things turned out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The converse happened after the US Supreme Court\u2019s 2008 decision in\u00a0District of Columbia v. Heller<\/i>, which struck down a longstanding gun ban in the nation\u2019s capital as unconstitutional. The city\u2019s mayor\u00a0predicted in dismay<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cmore handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,\u2019\u2019 yet crime in the district plunged.\u00a0Murder nose-dived<\/a>\u00a0to its lowest rate in half a century, falling from 186 in 2008 to 144 in 2009 to 132 in 2010 to 108 in 2011.<\/p>\n

The new study adds weight to the presumption that more guns in the hands of law-abiding owners (i.e., those who properly register their firearms when required to do so) makes those gun-owners safer. There is a measure of irony, too: Second Amendment activists were so certain that publication of the gun-permit data would expose them to danger. In reality, it did the opposite.<\/p>\n

According to Acquisti and Tucker, only 19 states open gun-permit holders\u2019 information to the public. More states should be doing so \u2014 with the approval, not the resistance, of those who champion the right to keep and bear arms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I don’t agree with the premise that possession stats should be publicized, the fact that ‘more guns’ means ‘more safety’ is undeniable. More guns, more safety Late in 2008, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a leading Tennessee newspaper, unleashed a whirlwind of controversy when it decided to publish a database of all state residents with … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80782,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80781\/revisions\/80782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}