On Tuesday, three days after the District of Columbia’s ban on carrying handguns outside the home was struck down in federal court, Washington Post staff reporter Emily Badger teamed with
anti-gun researcher Daniel Webster, of Michael Bloomberg’s School of
Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, in an attempt to disparage
John Lott’s research on the effect of Right-to-Carry laws. Gun control supporters’ arguments against Right-to-Carry laws have certainly morphed over the years. In 1987, when Unified Sportsmen of Florida (USF) president and future NRA president Marion Hammer, and the USF and NRA members she represented, launched the national Right-to-Carry (RTC) movement with a successful campaign for a “shall issue” carry permit law in The Sunshine State, gun control supporters predicted that it would lead to wild shootouts on every corner.
The prediction didn’t come to pass in Florida or any of the states that have since adopted RTC laws against gun control supporters’ advice. To the contrary, as the number of RTC states steadily increased during the 1990s, violent crime plummeted. The debate stopped being about whether RTC laws caused crime to increase, and started being about the extent to which they contributed to violent crime’s decline.
At that point, the debate over RTC laws should have been brought to an abrupt and long overdue close. People have the right to carry firearms to defend themselves regardless of the extent to which doing so deters crime.
By that time, however, anti-gun activists had worked themselves into a rage over Lott’s research, which found that RTC laws decrease violent crime...more
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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