SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093
State laws that require gun purchasers to obtain a license contingent on passing a background check performed by state or local law enforcement are associated with a 14 percent reduction in firearm homicides in large, urban counties.
Studies have shown that these laws, which are sometimes called permit-to-purchase licensing laws, are associated with fewer firearm homicides at the state level. This is the first study to measure the impact of licensing laws on firearm homicides in large, urban counties, where close to two-thirds of all gun deaths in the U.S. occur.
The study was published online May 22 in the Journal of Urban Health and was written by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
Handgun licensing laws typically require prospective gun purchasers to apply directly to a state or local law enforcement agency to obtain a purchase permit, which is dependent on passing a background check, prior to approaching a seller. Many state licensing laws also require applicants to submit fingerprints.
The study also found that states that only required so-called comprehensive background checks (CBCs) -- that is, did not include other licensing requirements -- were associated with a 16 percent increase in firearm homicides in the large, urban counties. In states that only require a CBC the gun seller or dealer, not law enforcement, typically carries out the background check.
"Background checks are intended to screen out prohibited individuals, and serve as the foundation upon which other gun laws are built, but they may not be sufficient on their own to decrease gun homicides," said Cassandra Crifasi, PhD, MPH, assistant professor with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and the paper's lead author. "This study extends what we know about the beneficial effects of a licensing system on gun homicides to large, urban counties across the United States."
In addition to sending potential purchasers to law enforcement and requiring fingerprints, state licensing laws provide a longer period for law enforcement to conduct background checks. These checks may have access to more records, increasing the likelihood that law enforcement can identify and screen out those with a prohibiting condition. Surveys from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research find that the majority of both gun owners and non-gun owners support this policy.
[...] For the study, a sample of 136 of the largest, urban counties in the U.S. was created for 1984-2015 and analyses were conducted to assess the effects of changes to the policies over time.
The study also examined the impact of right-to-carry (RTC) and stand- your-ground (SYG) laws. SYG laws give individuals expanded protections for use of lethal force in response to a perceived threat, and RTC laws make it easier for people to carry loaded, concealed firearms in public spaces.
The researchers found that counties in states that adopted SYG laws experienced a seven percent increase in firearm homicide, and counties in states with RTC laws experienced a four percent increase firearm homicide after the state's adoption of the RTC law.
"Our research finds that state laws that encourage more public gun carrying with fewer restrictions on who can carry experience more gun homicides in the state's large, urban counties than would have been expected had the law not been implemented," said Crifasi. "Similarly, stand-your-ground laws appear to make otherwise non-lethal encounters deadly if people who are carrying loaded weapons feel emboldened to use their weapons versus de-escalating a volatile situation."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Wednesday June 06 2018, @04:15AM (5 children)
Or...if there were no poor people, there would virtually no gun crime.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:37AM (4 children)
This is quite accurate. If you look at the statistics of violent crime across all nation's, you'll see a much stronger correlation with poverty, in particular with economic disparity, than with anything else. In general people will become violent when severely desperate and hopeless. Happy people seldom do.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)
In general, a people will become poor when criminality becomes culturally pervasive; when they reject that criminality, they will once again rise up into productivity.
Guess what? Poverty literally begets poverty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:51PM
This entire article is an exercise in pretending correlation is causation, with a significantly weaker correlation than that of poverty and crime might I add.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Wednesday June 06 2018, @02:22PM (1 child)
Its actually false in that you get a much stronger correlation of crime with race, and there is a side issue correlation of race with economic success. Its fairly easy to find poor white communities with crime rates low enough to blow the theory. Poland doesn't have twice the gun crime of Appalachia and Baltimore has nearly twice the income of Poland and many Appalachian counties but just slightly higher gun crime rate. There are no black communities on the entire planet that are not statistically unusually violent regardless of law or geography. May not like it, may not be holy as per progressive religious outlook to point it out, but its certainly the truth.
The original OP poster's comment about all gun crime being Democrats is a dog whistle for black race which admittedly is like 95% democrat party members. However, certainly the average Democrat cat lady or the 30% or so of Asians who are Democrats are not a source of gun crime. The average politically correct limp wristed white hipster soy boy is not likely to be a gun criminal. Even Democrat hispanics, even with the narco terror gangs, still don't approach black levels of criminality. Gun crime has a color, and we're not talking about the paint on the rifles. Its like sickle cell anemia, propensity to a disease doesn't mean they're necessarily evil or immoral but you gotta recognize it to even start to improve it.
If it were not for 95% of blacks being Democrats, it would be impossible to dog whistle about the problem being "democrats". In that way the progressives are between a rock and a hard place, if they let blacks off the democratic plantation and permit them to say right wing things (LOL as if the overseers would permit that... see Kayne, etc) then Democrat wouldn't equal gun criminal but with less than 95% of a constituency they'd have to serve blacks needs politically instead of blacks serving them and getting nothing as has been the case for generations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:33PM
You are more looney than the cartoon!
Seriously, you're mentally unstable and not because I disagree with your position. You literally believe crazy things and ignore everything that shows your views to be wrong.