Lets say that the anti-gunners win, and every lawful citizen turns in their guns, what about the unlawful ones? Imagine in this world you are sitting at home with your family and an armed criminal kicks in your front door wielding an illegal 12 Gauge shotgun. The fact that he is holding an illegal shotgun will not stop him from blowing holes in you with it. BUT if you had a way to defend yourself (other then harsh language) you could potentially save yourself and your family.

In the world we currently live in that criminal would have to think twice before entering your home as he may be running into the wrong end of a shotgun himself. The same can be said for mugging and rapes and murder. If more people carried concealed handguns, and used them when they were forced too, crime would go down, period. Criminals talk to each other. And if a larger percentage of criminals got put down lawfully by CHL holders, I promise you it will get criminals attention.

The only problem with CHL is the same as the Death Penalty. It is simply not utilized enough to be a major deterrent of crime. So rather then discouraging an effective weapon against crime, and ignoring one of the most fundamental rights that our forefathers guaranteed us, shouldn’t we be encouraging it?

I’ll end this post with a simple illustration. If just ONE person was armed with a CHL and took action in the Luby’s in Killeen, TX when a madman came in and killed 23 and wounded 20 more people, 43 people wouldn’t have to be shot right now.

It’s your life, if you don’t protect it, who will?

FWIW, I used the metro area table for easy comparison with NYC as narrowly defined as possible using those stats (table 4 of the 2004 FBI violent crime report available through your link). Because Florida cities are rather small relative to their metro areas, and their crime numbers tend to skew higher, the comparison is as good for your point as possible.

To be precise, Table 8 has a straight city-city comparison. There, using a little back of envelope math, it appears the per 100k violent crime numbers (violent crimes/population, then *100k) would be NYC (687), Miami (1677), Tampa (1594), Orlando (1748).

The Texas cities may be more representative relative to their metro areas, but don’t help your argument: Dallas (1315), Houston (1146).

Your best counterargument is DC, which has a relatively high violent crime rate (1325 by the table used above) and a handgun ban, as you explain above. However, it’s comparable to the Texas and Florida cities, way higher than NYC, so it doesn’t really make your point. Instead, it’s more of a control that NYC’s gun ban probably doesn’t play a role in its relatively low crime rate.

If you have better numbers, please link to those.

The problem is for a criminal to think people might be armed in any one instance, nearly everyone has to be armed because crime is so (relatively) rare (even in the “high crime” areas, we’re talking around 1 in 1000).

Gun bans, or gun rights, frankly, don’t make a lick of difference and are just a distraction to figuring out how best to reduce crime in the real world. But whatever it is, New York appears to be onto something.

Unfortunately, all of the areas in question suffer from the same problem with respect to trying to analyze what effect a gun ban has. When I get some time I’ll dig up some more appropriate numbers, if you really feel you must see them.

But if you don’t believe numbers, and it’s easy not to since anyone can make them say anything they want, as you’ve demonstrated, ask the convicts. They will tell you virtually every time that they wouldn’t have even tried to commit the crime if they’d thought the victim might be armed.

Considering the volume of tourists that both places see, the data are fairly comparable and provides a good comparison of the two ends of the policy.

The Texas numbers cast further doubt on the comparison. Dallas doesn’t see nearly as many tourists who are always vulnerable to crime as New York, yet has a slightly higher violent crime rate (614); Houston’s is considerably higher (723).

I like the site, but this sloppy reasoning is suggestive that the evidence that this particular infringement on freedom has something to do with the crime rate is quite overblown and undermines your other, better, posts.

Something along the lines of, there’s a gun ban in D.C., and Cheney still managed to shoot someone.