Immigration Reform - It IsTime

Earlier this week, eight Senators evenly split on party lines advanced a new immigration bill that will enact significant reforms in our immigration system.  This is wonderful news except for some of the details.

The bill supports amnesty, of sorts, for undocumented aliens already living and working in the US but does not offer a unique path to citizenship.  Rather they must "...go to the back of the line..." to get access to a green card and/or citizenship.  The logic advanced by the bill's sponsors is that by coming to this country illegally they violated our laws and are not as worthy as someone who is outside the US waiting for a visa.  This argument is wrong.  The undocumented aliens in this country, by and large, are law-abiding members of society that have been contributing value to our economy, our country, and our society.  While they did come here illegally (or overstayed their visas), they have been contributing members of society and should be recognized as such.

Gun Control and Politics

In my last post, I outlined how the murder rate has been dropping in this country at the same time that the number of states that are issuing Concealed Carry permits has been increasing.  While it is impossible to say that there is a causative affect, the numbers certainly track.  Unfortunately I hit a wall attempting to track the number of Concealed Carry permits on a year-by-year basis.  The NRA lists "over 8 million" (NRA Article ) and another site actually shows nearly 8.6 million permits (Reference).  I have only found limited data on the growth in permits over the years.  It is probably out there on a state-by-state basis but it is tedious to dig it out of the published data.

A lot of debate ensued when a few states enacted shall-issue laws for concealed carry permits.  Much of that debate was in the late 90's.  John Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime was published in 1998.  Several liberal analysts have attacked that work and Dr. Lott but their methods have since been discredited.  So, the gun control zealots would have everyone believe that guns are making the country less safe.  At the same time, and as noted in my earlier post, the violent crime rates have been steadily dropping since 1992.  I am not writing about a small drop;  the murder rate and number of murders is down nearly 50%!  The overall violent crime rate is also down nearly 50%.  All of that data is available at the FBI UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) website (Total Crime Data 1992-2011).  To get the number of firearms deaths by year, you have to go to the FBI UCR site and extract the statistics pretty much on a year-by-year basis.  I did that for the earlier post.

If you accept the premise that the number of new firearms is increasing annually, you can also make an argument that more guns equals less crime.  Here the data is a little murkier.  Since 1998 when the NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) was established by the FBI, the number of annual checks for firearms purchases has been increasing.  The FBI publishes data on their website for the number of checks since 1998 (Reference Here).  They also list the number of denials.  For the 160 million background checks since 1998, there were just under 1 million denials (See Denials).  Since each background check can account for more than one gun, it is not possible to exactly correlate the number of firearms sold annually.  Also, the total number of background checks includes about 38.5 million permit checks which, presumably, do not correlate directly to a gun sale (See Itemized Totals).  If we take out the permit checks, about 75% of the background checks amounted to the sale of a firearm.  Since some checks were for the purchase of more than one gun, a one-to-one correspondence has some error.  Using these data and another estimate of 300 million firearms in the US (  ), we can estimate that 120 million firearms have been introduced into the US since 1998 and there were approximately 180 million guns prior to the NICS system.

Looking at the data, at first glance, the murder rate is rolling off as the estimated number of firearms increases but it does not look to be correlated.

When we plot the murder rate against the number of firearms, however, there does seem to be some trending although the correlation is not strong.  See below:

Since the FBI data also shows about 25% of the checks are due to permit checks, if we assume that that trend has been the same since 1998, we can plot cumulative permits and murder rate as well as Murder Rate versus cumulative permits.  While there are a lot of assumptions here, at least it is an attempt to look at trending.  See the following two graphs and you will see that number of permit checks correlates better to murder rate than total number of guns.

So, do more guns equate to less crime?  Look at the trends.  Certainly violent crime is dropping even as the number of firearms is increasing.  Certainly the violent crime rate is decreasing as more Americans avail themselves of the right to carry a concealed firearm.  Is there a causative link?  None of these data proves that nor is any of this a rigorous statistical study.  On the other hand, this is many times the data being advanced by the gun control folks who have nothing but a bad feeling about guns.  They have feelings, there is data out there that tends to refute their argument.

Right now the New Mexico delegation is leaning towards increased background checks and magazine restrictions.  Background checks help keep guns out of the hands of bad people and it is hard to argue against the premise.  If it can be made fairly simple for a person to transfer his firearm to a legitimate buyer and the cost of increasing the checks is not unreasonable, it is hard to argue against this.

Magazine restrictions, however,are another knee-jerk reaction or another attempt to gradually chip away at gun rights.  I see no data that supports the idea of magazine restrictions except that some small number of mass shootings have occurred with large capacity magazines.  If you look at the total number of mass shootings compared to the total number of firearms deaths, there is no reasonable argument for a restriction. There is a better argument for expanding firearms ownership to more people than there is for a magazine capacity ban.

It is time to contact our two Senators, one of whom (Udall) is up for re-election in 2014.  Ms. Lujan-Grisham who is fully invested in the Obama/Biden proposals is up for re-election in 2014.  Keep track of her votes on this issue.  I certainly will.

A rational look at the fallacy of gun control

Take a deep breath, everyone, and let's examine the current arguments being advanced for another assault rifle ban and restrictions on magazine size.  Is there really any rational argument for these restrictions?  I say no and provide the following analyses to support that position.

I am an NRA member and I have sometimes become annoyed with their frequent requests for money to fight whatever scourge is threatening our rights at a particular time.  That being said, they provide an invaluable opposition to gun control.  I bring this up because they are being pilloried by the gun control advocates for doing exactly what I expect them to do.  The current battle over Assault-style weapons bans and magazine capacity has nothing to do with assault weapons and everything to do with a gun grab.  Seriously, the gun control advocates are really attempting to piecemeal-ban all firearms.  I never took this idea too seriously but, given the rarity of death by assault rifle, does anything else make sense? 

Given the roughly 300 million firearms in the US, even banning all guns would have little effect on the homicide rate unless the government decided to confiscate all privately-owned firearms.  That would lead to at least widespread civil disobedience.  Only the most rabid anti-gun persons are advocating such a thing but to achieve their goal of a gun-free US, they would need to do that.  In reality, the gun control advocates are attempting to stir up enough sympathy and public opinion to force whatever restrictions they can get onto all of us.  If the pro-gun side puts up an argument, a left-leaning reporter will find someone to examine his work and describe it as discredited as was done with John Lott’s work

For some reason, the left has decided that gun control is their mantra.  There are some on the right that share that vision but mostly they have staked out the other side of the argument.  Here the NRA is a single-issue organization and non-partisan.  Harry Reid, a Democrat, has an A-rating from the NRA and actually delivered a modification to Obamacare to disallow doctors from sharing certain medical records with the government for gun control.

I notice a few things in most of the pro-gun control and pro-gun articles I read.  Everyone is quoting ‘facts’ or statistics to support their position.  In most cases, the statistics are quite dated.  When someone throws out 12,000 to 14,000 deaths from firearms per year in the US, as was done recently by Piers Morgan, they are either quoting older data or the total homicide figure for a recent year.  The total numbers of homicides, the murder rate, and the number of firearms-related homicides have been dropping since 1992.  Today our murder rate is half of what it was in 1992!

Since the murder rate is decreasing, albeit not steadily, and the number of firearms is generally increasing, is there any correlation?  Even suggesting such a thing will get me damned in liberal circles but let’s look at a phenomenon that has been sweeping the country since around 1989.  That is, since 1989, the number of states that have gone from either not issuing concealed carry permits to either issuing permits on a shall-issue or unrestricted basis has been steadily climbing.  While a lot of people on the anti-gun side don’t like to admit it, there is a pretty sharp drop in murder rate and violent crime since the rise of shall-issue concealed weapon permitting.  Using the adoption of concealed carry law changes (Data on Shall-Issue Concealed Weapon Permitting.) vs. the FBI Uniform Crime Data, it sure looks like there could be a relationship. 

If we plot the Murder rate against the number of right-to-carry states, we find a pretty good linear trend.  See below:

Okay, so figures don’t lie but liars figure.  I can see the gun control advocates reaching for their pens right now.  There is nothing to show that there is a causative relationship between the number of shall-issue concealed carry states and the murder rate but gee, it sure looks convincing.  Since we know that roughly 2/3 of the homicides are firearms related, this measure (number of shall-issue states) is at least related.  Also, if you look at the statistics, about 70% of firearms homicides are committed with handguns, not rifles (<4% in 2011).  That kind of rules out the assault rifle ban as being a contributor but when you look at the next figure you will see that a good amount of the drop in homicides did occur during the assault rifle ban.  Because of the low percentage of homicides by rifle, however, I reject that as illogical.  I also don’t believe that the ruling Presidential party or President has any effect on criminal good will but you can see that as well on the following graph.

So, do more guns mean less crime?  I know what I would say.  The number of permits to carry now number in the millions.  Most of the permits require classroom instruction that outlines the restrictions on lawful discharge.  That instruction alone may have something to do with the trends.  The people getting the permits are well-screened and well-informed.  The number of permit holders committing unjustified homicides is very low at 485 since 2007(according to the anti-gun Violence Policy Institute) compared to a total number of firearms deaths of 46,074 for the same period.

 

My own conclusion is that better education for legal firearms owners and more legal availability of firearms for qualified individuals does deter crime.

More Gun Control, Really?

The Newtown shootings have brought out the hysterical anti-gun lobby again.  In fact, their response to the tragedy came even before the facts of the shooting had been released.  Everyone mourns the loss of life in the Newtown school shootings.  Few things could be less tragic.  Still, the demands of people for additional gun control are no more rational now than they were before Newtown.

I waited to publish anything on this subject for two reasons.  At first, it seemed inappropriate because of the mourning of the victims although that did not stop the anti-gun lobby.  Then I examined what I had written and concluded that I had no new ideas on opposing gun control.  The piece I wrote sounded like hundreds of others.  I am writing now because perhaps I see a different dynamic than has been published elsewhere and because many people are not examining the arguments for gun control in sufficient depth as far as how it would affect the average citizen.

First, rather than diminish the gun control zealots as illogical, fuzzy-brained fools, let me say that most of them are well intentioned, not unintelligent, and truly believe in what they are saying.  The bulk of the gun control argument, however, is confined to sound bites that mostly is accurate.  The anti-gun activists are truly convinced that fewer guns would result in less crime.  Truly, if there were zero guns in the United States, there could be no gun violence.  The fact that it would be impossible to get to the point that there were zero guns in the US does not diminish their faith in restricting the rights of others. 

What the activists seem unable to comprehend is that none of the communities in the United States that have extreme gun control have any lower firearms-related crime rates than similar cities with less restrictions.  I would also note that Illinois, which currently bans concealed carry, is under federal court order to change their laws because of a citizen’s lawsuit ( see http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-12-11/news/chi-us-appeals-court-strikes-down-states-concealedcarry-ban-20121211_1_court-strikes-appeals-court-david-sigale).  It was alleged and affirmed that the Illinois law unnecessarily put citizens at risk because they could not defend themselves.  Anti-gunners take note!

Let’s look at how the Newtown disaster could have been prevented.  Banning the rifle used would not have stopped the tragedy as the shooter was already in violation of the existing gun possession laws in Connecticut and would still have had two illegally possessed handguns were the rifle unavailable.  More logically, there should have been armored and alarmed doors and windows.  Also, an armed presence in the school, either police or specially-permitted administrators, should also have been in place and would have prevented the attack.  In terms of efficacy, armored schools with some form of armed presence would deter the kind of tragedy that transpired in Newtown.

The NRA has advocated placing armed police in all schools as a federal initiative.  While I agree with the idea, I disagree that it should be a federally-mandated measure.  Let the local authorities decide this for themselves.

Since the gun control activists are advocating the same old laws that expired a few years ago, let’s examine the impact of those laws on citizens of New Mexico.  Given an assault rifle ban, the value of existing assault rifles would rise.  Also, once the law is in place, a design can be altered to get a similar firearm into legal status.  Finally, and perhaps of most importance to New Mexicans, the Brady Bill permitting and waiting periods would significantly inconvenience firearms purchasers.  In New Mexico, no permit is required to own any legal firearm.  There is also no waiting period.  You take your money to the gun store, find what you want, pass the federal background check, and walk out with your gun.  

It should also be noted that in New Mexico, possession of a loaded firearm in your vehicle is perfectly legal; your vehicle is considered an extension of your home.  Restrictive federal laws would most likely restrict New Mexicans based upon policies in the northeast and west coast.

If the true goal is less gun violence, we will need to first make the country safer.  We can improve things with a greater police presence.  With greater police presence, people would feel safer.  As they felt safer, we would see less need to arm ourselves.  It is a long-term trend.  More police would require additional tax revenues.  This is not likely to happen throughout the US for any number of reasons.