Junk science
A coming article in some journal I’ve never heard of purports to show that a repeal of requiring handgun licenses resulted in an immediate spike in gun violence and murders. But wait, there’s more:
The study links the abandonment of the background check to an additional 60 or so murders occurring per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012.
Well, in MO, there was no abandonment of background checks. Those are still required by federal law. Presumption is flawed. Results useless.
February 17th, 2014 at 6:53 pm
MO: Homicide Rate:
00 7.11
01 7.75
02 6.45
03 5.66
04 6.42
05 7.20
06 7.05
07 6.52
08 8.14
09 7.18
10 7.01
11 6.09
12 6.46 CDC/FBI
Its horse manure all right, not statistically significant.
February 17th, 2014 at 7:15 pm
Forget Permit to Purchase, how bout permit to carry?
AK Homicide rate: Note that Shall-issue went into effect ’95, Con Carry in ’04.
’12 4.1
’11 4.1
’10 4.3
’09 3.1
’08 4.1
’07 6.4
’06 5.4
’05 4.8
’04 5.6
’03 6
’02 5.1
’01 6.1
’00 4.3
’99 8.6
’98 6.7
’97 8.9
’96 7.4
February 18th, 2014 at 12:45 am
according to the recording on that link, since the 1920s, “you would go to your local sheriff’s office and they would carefully vet your application and determine whether you are a, um, legal to possess that handgun or not.”
let me fix that for you: “you would go to your local sheriff’s office and they would…determine whether you are [black].”
February 18th, 2014 at 11:51 am
“Well, in MO, there was no abandonment of background checks. Those are still required by federal law. Presumption is flawed. Results useless.”
Not quite, and the distinction is going to be important. Apparently Missouri dropped their State-level “universal” background checks requirement; the article about it that I skimmed was talking about removing background checks required of “non-licensed sellers” – i.e. private sales.
If that’s indeed the case (I haven’t looked into it more deeply yet to confirm) then we can’t just dismiss this as “there aren’t any background checks!” factless hysteria and lies, because this report will be trotted out to support “universal” background check proposals.
The “no statistical significance” approach is a lot more important and should be our response; we should not simply dismiss it as following from a flawed premise.
February 18th, 2014 at 12:37 pm
What went away was the ‘Permit To Acquire’ (also known as the ‘Mommy may I?’) that was required for handgun purchases.
Different sheriffs did it differently. In most counties you had to go get a permit and then had 30 days to buy a handgun. In some you had to go find your handgun and take all of the information on it to get the permit to buy that exact gun.
As noted, it was simply a way to make sure the ‘wrong people’ didn’t get handguns.
February 18th, 2014 at 4:37 pm
What KCSteve said.
This was just a permit to “acquire” a concealable weapon from the county sheriff (or the chief of police in St. Louis, which is not in a county).