Concealed Carry v. Crime, Part II
While this seemed unlikely to me, and while I don’t have time to build additional infographics representing new data, it was worth looking into. The best way to do so, as far as I could tell, was by examining the murder rate, which does not include attempted murders; therefore, the crimes included would be successfully completed crimes that would almost certainly not have otherwise gone unreported. If the negative outcomes in overall violent crime rates were masking what were in fact positive outcomes by way of an increase in the reporting of attempted crimes, then we should see more positive outcomes in states’ murder rates.
Digging into the data (I’ve updated the spreadsheet where I tracked all of this) we do in fact see a slightly higher number of positive outcomes: seven states had positive changes in 5-year average murder rates compared to the change in the national average, as opposed to four positive changes in overall violent crime rates. However, as with the overall violent crime rate, far more states had negative outcomes.
Positive
- National average increased, state average decreased: 2 (FL, OR)
- National average decreased, state average decreased more: 4 (AK[2], CO, MN, TX)
- National average increased, state average increased less: 1 (ID)
- National average decreased, state average increased: 5 (AK[1], AZ, GA, MO, OH)
- National average increased, state average increased more: 3 (MS, PA, WV)
- National average decreased, state average decreased less: 13 (AR, KY, LA, MI, MT, NM, NV, NC, OK, SC, TN, UT, VA)