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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-won't-like-that dept.

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."

Source: https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2018/handgun-purchaser-licensing-laws-linked-to-fewer-firearm-homicides-in-large-urban-areas.html


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:38AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @05:38AM (#689197)

    > Where exactly in that statement does it say that you can't own any of the above?

    Take a look at:
    http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=38422 [upenn.edu]
    To understand language usage at the time of the Founders, some researchers have digitized numerous contemporary documents, which can be searched for context to work out how certain words were used back then.

    It was only three weeks ago that BYU Law School made available two corpora that are intended to provide corpus-linguistic resources for researching the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. And already the corpora are yielding results that could be very important.

    The two corpora are COFEA (the Corpus of Founding Era American English) and COEME (the Corpus of Early Modern English). As I've previously explained, COFEA consists of almost 139 million words, drawn from more than 95,000 texts from the period 1760–1799, and COEME consists of 1.28 billion words, from 40,000 texts dating to the period 1475–1800. (The two corpora can be accessed here.)

    Within a day after COFEA and COEME became available, Dennis Baron looked at data from the two corpora, to see what they revealed about the meaning of the key phrase in the Second Amendment: keep and bear arms. (Baron was one of the signatories to the linguists' amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller.) He announced his findings here on Language Log, in a comment on my post about the corpora's unveiling:

            Sorry, J. Scalia, you got it wrong in Heller. I just ran "bear arms" through BYU's EMne [=Early Modern English] and Founding Era American English corpora, and of about 1500 matches (not counting the duplicates), all but a handful are clearly military.

    Two weeks later, Baron published an opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled "Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of ‘bear arms’," in which he repeated the point he had made in his comment, and elaborated on it a little. Out of "about 1,500 separate occurrences of 'bear arms' in the 17th and 18th centuries," he said, "only a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized, armed action." Based on that fact, Baron said that the two corpora "confirm that the natural meaning of 'bear arms' in the framers’ day was military."

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by shortscreen on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:44AM

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:44AM (#689209) Journal

    That is interesting, and if they hadn't put the corpus behind a f73king google log-in I would have liked to look at it myself.

    The argument made by that Baron fellow is laughable though. I wasn't aware that the meaning of "keep and bear arms" was ever in dispute. How would the revelation that part of that phrase was seen mostly in a military context have any implications for the rest of the amendment?

    As the USA is not a monarchy, it may well be that the word "throne" is generally used to refer to a toilet. That would not prove that "Game of Thrones" is really a show about plumbing.

    I wonder what a search for the words "well-regulated" would yield.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:06AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:06AM (#689251) Journal

    Sorry, J. Scalia, you got it wrong in Heller. I just ran "bear arms" through BYU's EMne [=Early Modern English] and Founding Era American English corpora, and of about 1500 matches (not counting the duplicates), all but a handful are clearly military.

    The petty game goes on. Just because you performed a ritual with a few computers and PhDs, doesn't mean that one gets to interpret the Constitution any way one feels like. Here, why is it supposedly significant that "bear arms" is frequently used in a "clearly military" context in unrelated documents (unrelated because they don't have legal bearing on the Constitution)? Why does it supposedly invalidate former Justice Scalia's write up [supremecourt.gov] of the majority opinion (DC v. Heller where an oppressive ban on firearm ownership was overturned by the US Supreme Court)? This is a profoundly dishonest argument which is invalidated by actually reading the Constitution itself.

    Further, it's quite clear what the Second Amendment says on the subject. Sorry, English didn't drift that much. For example, it speaks of "the People". As Scalia noted above, every instance of a right granted to "the People" outside of the Second Amendment has been an individual right granted to all civilians (not merely a community right granted superfluously to all military who would have firearms anyway). Second, it's quite clear that the amendment is divided into two parts, the first being explicative (the "prefactory clause" in the language of the DC v. Heller ruling) and the second being the actual mandate (the "operative clause").

    Sorry, the real solution here is get an amendment passed not to interpret the Constitution however one feels like. That is an abuse which can justify anything no matter how horrible.

    • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:26AM (1 child)

      by Mykl (1112) on Thursday June 07 2018, @12:26AM (#689644)

      Just because you performed a ritual with a few computers and PhDs, doesn't mean that one gets to interpret the Constitution any way one feels like

      Kinda funny that the rest of your post consists of you doing exactly that yourself.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:29AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 07 2018, @03:29AM (#689707) Journal
        Ermm, point to the PhDs and computers I use to back my point? For a better example of this, I favor [soylentnews.org] an asset tax over an income tax. But I don't pretend the Sixteenth Amendment, which allows for an income tax, similarly allows for an asset tax.