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.