Party running on one-note “anti-crime” [wink wink] campaign seeks to maximize firearm crimes
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That a society with a lot more people carrying guns will be more violent would seem to be self-evident, only one of the two major parties in the USA is organized in substantial measure around denying this particularly obvious thing:
Tony Earls hung his head before a row of television cameras, staring down, his life upended. Days before, Mr. Earls had pulled out his handgun and opened fire, hoping to strike a man who had just robbed him and his wife at an A.T.M. in Houston.
Instead, he struck Arlene Alvarez, a 9-year-old girl seated in a passing pickup, killing her.
“Is Mr. Earls licensed to carry?” a reporter asked during the February news conference, in which his lawyer spoke for him.
He didn’t need one, the lawyer replied. “Everything about that situation, we believe and contend, was justified under Texas law.” A grand jury later agreed, declining to indict Mr. Earls for any crime.
The shooting was part of what many sheriffs, police leaders and district attorneys in urban areas of Texas say has been an increase in people carrying weapons and in spur-of-the-moment gunfire in the year since the state began allowing most adults 21 or over to carry a handgun without a license.
[…]
The loosening of regulations also landed in the middle of a national debate over crime. Researchers have long argued over the effect of allowing more people to legally own and carry guns. But a series of recent studies has found a link between laws that make it easier to carry a handgun and increases in crime, and some have raised the possibility that more guns in circulation lead to more thefts of weapons and to more shootings by the police.
“The weight of the evidence has shifted in the direction that more guns equals more crime,” said John J. Donohue III, a Stanford Law School professor and the author of several recent studies looking at gun regulations and crime.
Of course, “crime” in political discourse ultimately has little to do with actual rates of violent crime per se, and as with COVID response blaming national trends on policies (real or imagined) enacted in some cities permanently coded as “dangerous” is endemic:
Sad as hell. No mission to inform, just to get "engagement" https://t.co/qPVqrnvnHH— Jake M. Grumbach (@JakeMGrumbach) October 26, 2022
well it's clear they're not thinking about "crime" as a discrete set of acts but "criminals" as a class of people who are criminals regardless of what they actually do. new york city is full of "criminals" so therefore it must have a higher crime rate than oklahoma https://t.co/FNjLgZXjcm— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) October 21, 2022