deepdiver wrote:
Statistically people who are licensed to CC are the most law abiding citizens and have a much lower rate of interaction with law enforcement, including for minor offenses such as speeding, than the average citizen. I have never seen statistics for OC and doubt there are any, but I would expect to see the same general trend. I would expect that 95% of gun owners are extremely law abiding, constitutionally focused, freedom and America loving citizens.
Think about it. If someone legally owns a modern firearm, the odds are that they have been through at least an NCIC background check and do not have a felony conviction, they are not habitual criminals, drug addicts or drunks and are not mentally ill. You can't even begin to guess the odds of those things with the person who does not legally own a firearm. If the person has a CC license/permit, the background check was even deeper and more thorough and covered even more ground. Legal gun owners, except for the occasional stupid ones, do not scare me whether their gun is on their person, in their car or at their home.
I don't know if those statistics are national or not but I alsohave seen some data that show that CCers as a group have lower crime rates than the overall citizen group and even police ( in TX?).
To compare the CC group to the OC group does make logical sense and one can make a few inferences therefrom. They're only inferences and sometimes just guesses. Sometimes just wishful guesses, I suspect...we'llsee as time goes on.
But there are a couple of variables upon which the OC group and theCC group differ: background check completion andage (or, at least,age range). It's pretty clear from discussions on OCDO that a major portion of the OC group eschews the obtaining of a CHL/CWP/LTCH. Therefore they are not subjected to their state's background check for a permit/license whereas
all permit/licences holders are. This differentiates the two groups substantially, making inferences from CC group behavior to OC group attributes somewhat chancy.
The age variable similarly provides someprobability for significant differences between the OC and CC groups. We can see from the Zach Doty case and others on this board that some 18-20 year olds carry a gun only because they have found a way around the usual 21 year old minimum for a CC permit/licensein almost all states. Are these young pups really as ready to behave as responsibly in carrying a gun as the vetted (not perfectly by any means) CC group or the older mainstream of the OC group? One can make a case
yes and one can make a case
no. Both cases would be weak, however. Not enough data.
The conclusions that a governing body could make from the above concepts arepretty self-evident. Especially, if an OCer somewhere, someplace getsinvolved in a particularly heinous or widely reported shooting.
The current level of any state's (or national) OC community political capital would be woefully insufficientto withstanda backlash by our politicos based on instantaneous public outrage from, say,a Cho-like OCer. Even a mini-Cho.
