"Richard Lewis" wrote in message
hlink.net...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

Not at all. Sometimes they can be looked up an measured to see if they're
true or not.

As Gunner's quote is easily done if you would open a browser and close
your mouth long enough.

You ought to take your own advice first, Richard, or learn to use your
browser a little better. You did make a tedious mess of it with your
arbitrary selections of which states you'd count and not, but they can be
untangled.

First, a reminder of what we're talking about:

"25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on,
and walk down the street with no permit of any kind:
some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 US murders
are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?" --
Andrew Ford

The list of states you included as "open carry," seems to be one somebody
cooked up to make a point. The list I used was one posted on the Packing.org
site, which was footnoted, and I threw out the questionable ones with a lot
of exceptions indicated in the footnotes, to give the benefit of the doubt.
Then I checked them against "Survey of State Procedures Related to Firearm
Sales, Midyear 2001" (since I was using 2001 FBI figures), published by the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, to see what the purchase restrictions were. I
wound up with 27 states that sounded reasonable. Finally, I checked the
open-carry policy of footnoted states against Packing.org's report to see if
the list accurately reflected the states they consider "open carry." They
did. THEN I looked up the FBI numbers of murders per state and attached
them -- after I had selected the states. I sent the list to Larry Jaques who
can confirm that it's just the list of states without the ones that had all
the footnote qualifiers. (You can see the footnotes at the bottom, Larry,
but I stripped those questionable ones out before adding up the numbers, and
that's the list I sent to you.) Since I worked from a list of open-carry
states, and NOT from a list of restricted states, the District of Columbia
was included in my "not-open-carry" list by default.

It looks like you did just the opposite -- stretched your criteria when it
worked to the numerical advantage of your assertion. For example, you
included Utah as an "open-carry" state, noting that you did so even though
it has "some strict restrictions." *I'LL* say they're strict. For example,
the gun can't be loaded...

========================

Utah penal code 76-10-505: Carrying loaded firearm in vehicle or on street.
(1) Unless otherwise authorized by law, a person may not carry a loaded
firearm:
(a) in or on a vehicle;
(b) on any public street; or
(c) in a posted prohibited area.

========================

The "otherwise authorized" means one who possesses a CCW, or an officer of
the law.

It's funny you would include that one, which so obviously fails Ford's
criteria, until you note that Utah had only 43 murders in the year you
counted. Hmm. 'Sure helps the overall numbers, eh? And that number really is
low. Maybe it was because it's hard to murder someone with an unloaded
gun...unless you club him to death with it.

Of course, Ford's statement is nonsense from the get-go, because there is
nowhere in the US where "anyone can buy a gun, strap it on," etc., because
of the required federal background check and excluded categories of
purchasers. And many states, including some of the "open-carry" states, have
added further restrictions to who can buy a handgun.

But you've made more arbitrary distinctions here, and they're no more
consistent than the case of Utah. You throw out Missouri as an "open-carry"
state because of "permit to purchase etc. etc. etc.," but the "permit" is
only a piece of paper that carries the same data, and that requires only the
same check, as those of the dealer-check states. There's no safety training,
no fingerprints; it's just a piece of paper one gets because Mo. has
decided, like some other states, to do the background check at a police
station and to issue a "permit" that the buyer hands in at the gun store to
show he's gone through the federally mandated check.

If that's supposed to be some kind of unacceptable restriction, then what is
it? Or is there something in the "etc.'s"? Missouri has a new preemption
that cleans up most of the "etc's" except for local laws on open carry; but
then, so does Virginia, which you put in the "open-carry" column. Virginia
has grandfathered-in, no-open-carry municipalities, those which passed laws
prior to 1987, which make it about as "unpure" as Missouri is (not to
mention that Virginia has a one-handgun-purchase/month restriction, which
Missouri doesn't have). Why is one in each column, then?

Remember that ALL states are more restricted than "Ford" said.
Distinguishing the open-carry restrictions of Missouri as substantially
different from those of Virginia, or disqualifying Missouri's paperwork
that's used for certifying the passing of a background check because it's a
"permit" system, as if it was like the one NJ has (that's a REAL permit
system), is ludicrous. Until, of course, you note that Missouri had 372
murders. Then perhaps we get a better idea of why you made the arbitrary
distinction. Virginia has a very high number, too. Maybe you didn't want to
make it obvious by throwing both of them over to the other side.

And while we're on that, you said "Wisconsin has no open carry restrictions
that I could find," (though you didn't have trouble finding that relatively
low murder figure of 169) but you said nothing about the 48-hour waiting
period to purchase a handgun. So, carrying a piece of paper from police
station to dealer, as in Missouri or North Carolina, disqualifies those
states as purified "open carry" states, but a 48-hour waiting period is Ok?
That's not a purchase restriction in your mind? If you're going to get fussy
about states that do a background check at a sheriff's office or police
station and then issue a piece of paper on the spot, versus those that do
their background checks electronically at the dealer but that then make you
wait two days to buy a gun, then what is the meaning of making the "permit"
distinction in the first place? If you'd left it at NJ and NY, you'd have a
case. As you've done it, not...except that it gets more of those nasty
murders out of the "open-carry" column, eh?

There are more examples of silly distinctions you've made, and I wouldn't
bother except that the overall effect was to get a LOT of murders into the
not-open-carry column, and that in some cases that appears to be the only
reason you put them there. Michigan (672 murders in 2001) is interesting:
it's open-carry, but they have this little gun-safety quiz they give you, on
which you have to get 70% right, or you don't get your handgun. Another
nasty permit. If all of those people who are too dumb to know which end of a
gun the bullet comes out of were only allowed to buy handguns and carry them
around on their hips, unfettered by this anti-gunner nonsense, Michigan,
too, would have vastly lower murder rates. It isn't the marginally
intelligent people who passed the test who are going to save Michiganders
from violence; it's all of the truly stupid ones who couldn't buy a gun!
They're our real saviors, and we've hog-tied them from fulfilling their
heroic destiny with a safety quiz that any semi-sentient moron could pass,
but which they couldn't...

The logic of "Andrew Ford's" assertion is an abortion. You're trying to
defend it on hair-splitting grounds, and not very well at that, so I'll say
again, on equally hair-splitting grounds, what I said befo he's either a
liar or a moron. Even with your cherry-picked states as examples, as you
said yourself, you only came up with a 1/4 fraction. I said it was 1/3. Ford
said 1/5. By your measure or mine, even on that literalist basis by which
you've defended him, he's still full of it.

But that's not the real deception in his quote, which first counts his
fractions of the country by counting states, and then counts his fractions
of the murders by counting people, suggesting that his "half" and his "4/5"
are measured on comparable terms.

Who's crazy? Maybe Ford. Maybe the people who believe his point has any
merit. Maybe people who never thought seriously about logic. Maybe the
people who defend his obvious deception by splitting hairs in a grammatical
exegesis, and who think that's an honest way to settle an argument.

The significance of the issue really is a sorry one to begin with. To
suggest there's any relationship between a state's open-carry laws and crime
rates is an incredible stretch, first, because so few people strap guns on
and walk around "the streets," anyway. A note on the Packing.org site from a
guy in Kansas, says it all: involved enough with guns to have written to his
local sheriff for an explanation of open-carry, and to have posted the
Sheriff's reply on the Packing.org site, he notes at the bottom that, in his
20+ years he's lived in the state, he's never seen anyone open-carry a
handgun.

So much for "crazy."

Ed Huntress