Michael Luo opens his recent New York Times piece on concealed-carry permits with the tale of a Times-friendly bicyclist and his four-year-old son getting berated — and then shot at — by a macho SUV-driving fireman in Asheville, North Carolina — a liberal oasis in a rather conservative state.
The message is clear:
If not for that gun, Mr. Simons is convinced, the confrontation would have ended harmlessly. “I bet it would have been a bunch of mouthing,” he said.
Mr. Diez, then 42, eventually pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
More than 240,000 people in North Carolina have a permit to carry a concealed handgun:
More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.
Wait, over a five-year period, eight permit-holders killed someone with a gun? So, 1.6 gun-homicides per 240,000 permit-holders per year? Fewer than seven per million permit-holders per year. (I’m assuming each “murder or manslaughter” involved one victim.)
Over the past decade or so, North Carolina has averaged well over 300 gun-murders per year, with a population of around 9 million, implying almost 40 gun-murders per million people per year — almost six times the rate for permit-holders.
So, permit-holders, who almost certainly possess the means to commit gun violence, commit murder with a gun at one-sixth the average rate — the average rate for a population that includes the roughly 40 percent of households in NC that don’t have a firearm of any kind.
That said, clearly some concealed guns are in the wrong hands — but many, many more are in safe hands.