2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 112,262
- 52,476
Donohue is a scammer....his research has actually been shown to be crap......
The flawed and misleading Donohue, Aneja, & Weber Study claiming right-to-carry laws increase violent crime - Crime Prevention Research Center
The bottom line is pretty clear: Since permit holders commit virtually no crimes, right-to-carry laws can’t increase violent crime rates. You can’t get the 1.5 to 20 percent increases in violent crime rates that a few of their estimates claim with only thousandths of one percent of permit holders committing violent crimes. To put it differently, states would have to be miss reporting 99%+ of crimes committed by permit holders for their results to be possible.
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Donohue’s papers are the only ones to claim that there have been increases in aggravated assaults after right-to-carry laws were enacted. We will discuss the problems with this claim below. But more pertinently, permit holders commit virtually no aggravated assaults, especially not aggravated assaults with a weapon.
The authors’ purported increase in violent crime is driven by aggravated assaults. No explanation is offered for why having more permits would cause more assaults. No one would suggest that permit holders are more vulnerable to assault, so the claim would have to be that permit holders are doing the assaults themselves. But this is implausible, since permit holders are virtually never convicted of aggravated assaults, let alone aggravated assaults with firearms. Concealed handgun permit holders committing crime can simply not increase either aggravated assaults or violent crime.
Permit holders commit aggravated assaults and violent felonies at rates of thousandths of one percentage point, accounting for hundredths of a percent of the violent crimes or aggravated assaults committed in a state.
On page 45, the authors claim that “official withdrawals clearly underestimate criminality by permit holders,” but they offer no evidence for this claim. The provide one case in 2013 from the Huffington Post involving two permit holders who reportedly fatally shot each other. Another case from 2000 is provided, but that permit holder was prosecuted so it isn’t clear what this reference demonstrates. The point is clear: Even if convictions of permit holders are somehow being missed by reporting agencies, the error rate would have to be truly massive to explain Donohue, Aneja, and Weber’s results.
For example, take the discussion below for Michigan where we have data on violent crimes by permit holders. During the 2015-16 year, permit holders might have accounted for 0.053% of violent crime in the state. They claim that Michigan’s violent crime rates rose by 8.8% after their right-to-carry law was adopted, that is 166 times larger than permit holder’s share of violent crimes. To put it differently, for Donohue, Aneja, and Weber’s results to be plausible, police departments would have to bemissing 99.4% of cases where permit holders have committed violent crimes. For other states the numbers below show similar results: Louisiana police would have to miss 99.5% of crimes committed by permit holders, Oklahoma would have to miss 99.93%, Tennessee 99.98%, and Texas 99.54%.
These percentages assume that no crimes are stopped or deterred by permit holders. To the extent that is true, these percentages would have to be even larger.
In any case, even our numbers overestimate any crimes that might arise from permitted concealed handguns. There are two reasons for this. First, virtually none of even these few violent crimes by permit holders were committed with guns. Second, when you are talking about 600,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Michigan at least a few of them would have committed violent crimes even if there wasn’t a right-to-carry law in the state.