Missouri gun murders 'rose after law repeal'
Source: BBC
Researchers claim a new study provides some of the most compelling evidence yet for tighter gun controls in the US.
The team followed the consequences of the State of Missouri repealing its permit-to-purchase handgun law in 2007.
Coincident exactly with the policy change, there was an immediate upward trajectory to the homicide rates in Missouri, said Prof Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
That upward trajectory did not happen with homicides that did not involve guns; it did not occur to any neighbouring state; the national trend was doing the opposite it was trending downward; and it was not specific to one or two localities it was, for the most part, state-wide, he told BBC News.
Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26222578
There's a lot more information in the linked article, it's well worth reading.
onehandle
(51,122 posts)CanonRay
(14,125 posts)More guns = more gun murders. Whoda thunk it?
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)RC
(25,592 posts)liberal N proud
(60,349 posts)NOT!
Scuba
(53,475 posts)AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)Nothing inherently anti-2nd amendment about it either. No registration associated with it.
I'd do it. I'm already holding a CPL, so it's not like the government doesn't have a pretty good idea I have guns anyway.
NickB79
(19,279 posts)Missouri still requires background checks to purchase firearms from any licensed dealer. It's part of federal firearms law and no state is exempted from it. I think what they meant was that Missouri abandoned the state-conducted background check you undergo when you get a permit-to-purchase a handgun; the gun store must still conduct a federal background check before the sale. And a background check and permit-to-purchase is really no impediment at all; you fill out a 1-2 page form at your local police station, wait 6-10 days, and you get your permit.
What was stark, added Prof Webster, was the rise in the number of handguns that subsequently found their way into the hands of criminals.
The year the law changed and this study started (2007) overlapped with the still-ongoing boom in firearms and ammo sales brought on by paranoia and hysteria that President Obama would enact new gun control legislation. I'd imagine such paranoia would run especially high in a red state like Missouri. With or without a change to gun licensing requirements, it seems likely the residents of Missouri would have kept legally buying guns at a higher than normal level, which would definitely have an impact on the number of guns finding their way into the hands of those who couldn't legally own them.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)I just don't get the connection. Idiots, guns, homicides. They are clearly all in separate domains.
NutmegYankee
(16,204 posts)They are after all used in the vast majority of all shootings.
lark
(23,182 posts)They are ignoring the national trajectory and crediting the results with the assinine law, ignorning the people who've been shot and would probably have been safe without this idiot statute. Obviously, increasing access to guns = more killed. That "one good guy" theory is patently absurd when there were several mass killing at military bases.