Could one of the reasons liberals favor gun control be because they don’t trust their own kind with them? After all, when we look at the prison population, we find that in states where felons can vote, between 6 in 10 and 7 in 10 vote Democrat, depending on what state you look at. The percentage that vote Republican is in the single digits.
But fear not liberals, most gun owners aren’t like the company you keep. In fact, a new study titled “Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the Untied States 2016” published by the Crime Prevention Research Center finds that those with concealed-carry permits are almost the most law-abiding demographic of Americans. The Daily Signal reports: From 2007 through 2015, permits issued by state and local governments increased by 215 percent, to more than 14 million Americans, according to the data.
The study compared permit holders to police, who committed 703 crimes from 2005 to 2007, and 113 of those were firearm violations. “With about 685,464 full-time police officers in the U.S. from 2005 to 2007, we find that there were about 103 crimes per hundred thousand officers,” the report reads. “For the U.S. population as a whole, the crime rate was 37 times higher—3,813 per hundred thousand people.”
“We find that permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at less than a sixth the rate for police officers,” the report says. “Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000. That is just one-seventh of the rate for police officers.”
Keep that in mind someone says that only police should have guns (a statement which I doubt few liberals actually believe, since in the same breath they’ll blast all police as racists).
Crime Prevention Research Center President John Lott, a noted economist, said the finding is not surprising considering the rigorous process it takes to get a concealed-carry permit.
“The type of person that would go through the process, one in which you can often lose the license for fairly trivial offenses,” Lott told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “They are reluctant to use the the guns in a wrong way because they have a lot to lose if they do something wrong.”
The Daily Signal contacted gun control groups Everytown for Gun Safety and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, but neither responded.
Take my word on this one, the reason for their lack of response isn’t that they were too busy doing research of their own. Long ago, I (Matt Palumbo) was blocked by Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts simply for asking for evidence of one of her claims. Censorship and ignoring the opposition are a clear sign of which side is losing the debate.
[Note: This post was authored by Matt Palumbo. Follow him on Twitter @MattPalumbo12]
