The number of Americans asserting their right to carry concealed guns has exploded – from less than a million a few decades ago to as many as 11 million now. There's evidence that gun prevalence can deter crime, but preventable tragedies perturb.
Charles Ingram and Robert Webster were neighbors in Florida, but friends said the two older men had little love for each other and often quarreled. On a spring day in 2010, the two men, both gun enthusiasts who had state permits to carry concealed weapons, got into another argument across their lawns.
This time, police later said, both men pulled out their weapons. When Mr. Webster began approaching, Mr. Ingram raised his gun, as did Webster. Two shots rang out simultaneously, and both men fell. Webster died almost instantly, Ingram less than a month later.
That "Deadwood"-style neighborhood gunfight is one of 555 examples compiled by advocates of gun control detailing how the mere presence of legal guns can turn mundane moments into tragedies – sobering rebuttals against the estimated tens of thousands of times a year Americans brandish guns in self-defense to thwart crimes in progress.
THE LEGAL RIGHT TO SHOOT
As of January, all 50 states, with various exemptions, allow people without serious criminal records or mental illness to obtain a permit to carry a concealed gun. That expansion of concealed carry coincides with the adoption of a new breed of self-defense laws that give armed citizens more – but not total – police legal cover for shooting at fellow Americans.
In a recent paper titled "Second Amendment Penumbras," University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds points to major US Supreme Court decisions, including District of Columbia v. Heller, which in 2008 struck down the city's ban on handguns, as defining new parameters of self-defense and gun carry.
Until recently, Professor Reynolds writes, "gun ownership was treated as a suspect (or perhaps 'deviant' is a better word) act – one to be engaged in, if at all, at the actor's peril. But with gun ownership now recognized as an important constitutional right belonging to all Americans, that deviant characterization cannot be correct."
ARGUMENTS FOR CONCEALED CARRY
"I don't argue that there are no problems with [concealed-carry permit holders], but when you look at the data it's pretty hard to find any other group in the population that's as law-abiding as" permitted gun carriers, says John Lott Jr., an economist and gun-rights advocate and author of "More Guns, Less Crime."
"The type of person who's going to go through the process of getting a concealed-carry permit is not the kind of person you have to worry about," he says. "They're law-abiding citizens who have a lot to lose if they make a mistake."
Statistics support Mr. Lott's assertion. The number of incidents in which concealed-gun carriers kill innocent people is a fraction of 1 percent of all gun-related homicides. In North Carolina, one of only a handful of states that reveals the identities of permit holders, 200 of the 240,000 concealed carriers (.08 percent) committed felonies of all types, including eight shooting deaths, in the five-year period ending in 2011. This compares with about 2.5 percent of voting-age Americans who have a felony rap sheet, according to The Sentencing Project.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST
The "popcorn shooting" at the Tampa movie theater especially agitated pro-gun-control groups, who saw proof that even a gun carrier with decades of threat assessment experience could allow a situation to spiral out of control.
"Just because you're a law-abiding citizen today doesn't mean you're going to be one tomorrow," says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which keeps count of those killed by legal gun carriers in "non-self-defense" situations.
"In a lot of these cases," she says, "a shooter's life is ruined, an innocent person is dead, and there's a little girl with no father and a woman with no husband, and all because one guy believed the gun-lobby hype that 'I'm going to get this gun because someday I might need it.' "
The Violence Policy Center also marshals its own statistics on gun ownership and deaths, saying the total numbers of gun deaths, including suicides, are lower in states such as Massachusetts and Hawaii where there are fewer guns per capita than states with higher death rates, such as Louisiana and Wyoming.
WHERE WE'RE GOING
However persuasive the recent instances of gun violence have been for gun-control proponents, they haven't changed dramatic trend lines in attitudes and gun ownership in America, which George Washington University law professor Bob Cottrol says has always been at least symbolically an armed society.
More than 300 million guns are distributed among about 40 percent of US households.
Since 9/11, the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2003, and the social breakdown in New Orleans after Katrina, Americans have put aside post-Prohibition distrust of public gun carry and embraced the idea of it.
Surprisingly to some, 91 percent of 15,000 police officers polled recently by the PoliceOne organization also said they support citizens' ability to carry concealed weapons.
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