Where Have I Seen That Title Before?

(title being More Guns, Less Crime, of course!)

Record numbers now licensed to pack heat

Waving a chromed semiautomatic pistol, the robber pushed into the building in the bustling Five Points neighborhood of Columbia, S.C., just before 11 p.m. on April 11, 2009. “Gimme what you got!” he yelled, his gun hand trembling.

Attorney Jim Corley was one of four people in the room, the lounge area of a 12-step recovery group’s meeting hall. “He said, ‘Give me your wallet,’” Corley recalled. “So I reached around to my back pocket and gave him what was there.”

Unfortunately for the gunman, later identified as Kayson Helms, 18, of Edison, N.J., that was Corley’s tiny Kel-Tec .32, hidden in a wallet holster and loaded with a half-dozen hollow points. Corley fired once into the robber’s abdomen. The young man turned. Corley fired twice more, hitting him in the neck and again in the torso. Helms ran into the night and collapsed to die on a railroad embankment 100 feet away.

I find it fascinating that MSNBC of all places starts out a (more or less) neutral article about law-abiding gun owners with a story of successful self-defense using a handgun. That's nothing short of miraculous. Naturally, the article is filled with anti-gun claptrap like "packing heat" and "strapping guns on", but it is MSNBC after all. They go to great pains to show that there haven't been any studies showing that more guns = less crime, yet admit that more people are carrying guns and the crime rate has gone down. Coincidence?

Naturally, being MSNBC they interview not someone from the NRA, or one of the many state Right-To-Carry movements, or even one of the lawyers involved in the landmark Heller case, but someone from the VPC. They do follow up with Alan Gottlieb of the SAF, which is good, and the article is relatively PSH-free, refreshingly. As mentioned above, the article goes to great lengths to make the dubious claim that more permits does not mean less crime, adding in this quote:

Hemenway said that the most definitive review to date — a 2004 look at research on the topic by the National Research Council — “found no credible evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws increases or decreases violent crime.”

Even assuming this is true - and one need look only to the discredited Kellermann study or the "work" done by Bellesiles to see the quality of "research" done by anti-gun groups (think AGW) - isn't that in an of itself a ringing endorsement of greater concealed carry? If more people carrying firearms does not lead to the proverbial "blood in the streets", what's the harm? I think we can all agree that if shootings by gun owners with CCW permits were common or even only slightly rare that it would be front-page news. The fact that the worst they can say is that it had no effect - that they could find - is quite telling. Rather than the dire predictions of "old west" shootouts over parking spaces, we've seen... nothing.

Imagine that - people that obey the law who carry concealed firearms don't turn into deranged killers. Quelle surprise!

That is all.

Link to article sent by reader PISSED. Thanks!