Guns and Crime
In 2008, there were some laxed gun laws and the tail end of the great Obama gun rush. And, turns out, violent crime rates are the lowest recorded. And places that have gun bans saw an increase.
This was in the presence of a huge economic downturn which usually is an indicator for increased crime rates. So either gun ownership isn’t positively correlated with crime (and in fact is negative associated with crime rates) or there is some other driving factor which observers don’t know about or want to talk about.
September 15th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Yah – but while the FBI UCR supposedly runs back to the 1920s there was no real effort to gather actual data until 1958 or so. Even as late as 1968, a great many jurisdictions totals were guesstimates. As in your guess is as good as ours. And better if you have been keeping tabs on the local rags Police Reports.
But one thing is as obvious now as it was in 1968, when I started collecting gun control data. Guns are crime inhibitors. The more legal guns there are in circulation the lower the crime rate.
So the early part of the 20th century, when some contemporary estimates had one man in five and one woman in four “carrying” is probably the era with the lowest actual crime rate. What you see now is just the lowest number of crimes reported – admitted would be more accurate – by the police in the last fifty years.
Oh – with more than a million 4473’s a month, are you absolutely sure the end of 2008 was the end of the Obama gun rush?
Stranger