A study finds that neighborhoods with fewer gun permits issued to residents have higher numbers of burglaries, and it’s a statistic that seems to just make common sense.
Seeming to confirm the old adage that “an armed society is a polite society,” the newest study from the National Bureau of Economic Research took a look at a public database containing information on Tennessee’s concealed carry handgun permit holders and then cross-checked that list to reports of burglaries. A comparison of the zip codes of the two lists found a very telling result.
In its “Guns, Privacy, and Crime” report, the NBER found that the zip codes containing a higher number of handgun permit holders had the lowest burglary rates.
Why, it’s almost as if the criminals didn’t want to invade the homes in areas with high handgun permit rates, isn’t it?
According to the study, zip codes with the higher concentration of residences with handgun permit holders experienced 1.7 fewer burglaries per week. On the other hand, neighborhoods with the fewest number of permit holders suffered an average of 1.5 more burglaries per week.
The study found that the shift in crime rates occurred after the permit holder database was made public by a newspaper.
The authors of the study focused on the city of Memphis, Tennessee.
“We use detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for the city of Memphis to estimate the impact of publicity about the database on burglaries,” the authors said in their abstract. “We find that burglaries increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.”
The organization noted that it seems likely that criminals themselves identified the most vulnerable neighborhoods while planning their heists.
“Our study focuses on the very events of publication and publicization of gun permit ownership, so we directly study one mechanism for potential offenders to be aware of gun ownership rates, and therefore for guns to affect crime,” the authors of the study added. “Criminals may infer from the published data the probability of encountering armed resistance when committing certain crimes in a given location; this, in turn, should influence their propensity to commit the crime in that location.”
Buttressing their concept further, the NBER did not find any change in rates of crimes that are less premeditated, such as assaults or shootings.
Granted this is just one city in Tennessee being reviewed on the topic, but you can be sure that similar results have been occurring in other states where gun owner statistics have been published.
There is another thing you can probably bet on, and that is when the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper published its searchable online database, the paper didn’t think it was helping to increase crime in the most vulnerable neighborhoods of the city!
Critics said that the purpose of the database, which was controversial at the time, was geared to shame and frighten gun owners into deciding not to file for a permit so that they could avoid being outed by the newspaper. Instead, the paper only gave criminals a road map for where it would be safer to commit their crimes.
The study comes as gun ownership has been soaring across the U.S. for the past decade, especially among minorities.
As ABC reported late last year, the National Shooting Sports Foundation found that there was a 58.2 percent increase in gun purchases among blacks from 2019 to 2020. The group also found a 43 percent increase among Asians, and a 49 percent increase among Hispanics. And 40 percent of purchases were by first-time gun buyers.
These numbers have been going up since the Obama era and it shows that, especially among blacks, the barriers against gun ownership among minorities are falling by the wayside. It also seems to show that minorities, who have often skewed toward the Democrats and were more apt to accept the party’s hatred for guns, are dropping those ideas and beginning to accept the American principles of self-protection enshrined in the Second Amendment.
Despite the reality confronting them, Democrats continue to try and push the claim that gun owners are all angry white men. But the numbers increasingly show that gun owners truly reflect the diversity of this nation.
If the study from Memphis is any indication, the crooks are starting to sit up and take notice. After all, what criminal wants to pick a target that might fight back with deadly force?
