The SCOTUS Gun Ruling Will Create More Violent Crime

America is awash in gun violence with one or more mass shootings - i.e., where four or more individuals are shot in a single incident - occurring literally almost every day.  Yet in its decision in New York Sate Rifle & Pistol Assn v. Bruen, struck down New York State's 109 year old law restricting carrying guns, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that it favors few state controls - if any controls - over gun fanatics and by extension criminals. The contrast with the extremist majority's striking down of   Roe v. Wade which imposes state control over womens' bodies and stripped women of control over their own bodies is stunning.   The Bruen ruling is yet another instance of the out of control Court placing the desires and, in the case of guns, physical safety of the majority of citizens in a subordinate position to the demands of the few.   The Bruen ruling will lead to more violent crime and more gun deaths contrary to the lies and propaganda of the gun lobby which places gun manufacturers profits above all else.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at studies that confirm that more guns and more "right to carry" laws and court rulings INCREASES gun thefts and gun related crimes.  Be very afraid now that the Court has put more lives at risk and made police crime fighting more difficult.  Here are op-ed highlights:

In one of its major decisions this term, the Supreme Court struck down a 109-year-old New York law that said that only people who could demonstrate a compelling need to carry a gun could do so. Simply living in a dangerous neighborhood and wanting to protect oneself from crime wasn’t good enough, New York said — a judgment the court deemed unconstitutional, as it announced “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

Whatever one’s view of the best way to interpret the Second Amendment, we unfortunately know what effects this ruling will have in the relatively few states that still restrict the carrying of weapons (such as New York, California, New Jersey and Massachusetts). It will cause a spike in violent crime, lead to more guns being stolen, and result in the police solving fewer violent-crime cases. We know that’s true because research has established that that’s what has happened in other states that have liberalized their gun-carry laws.

In the last five years, more than a dozen empirical studies have concluded that right-to-carry laws increase violent crime. The latest found that, of the 47 largest cities in the United States, those in the states adopting right-to-carry laws experienced a roughly 30 percent increase in firearm-related violent crime (that is, homicide, aggravated assault and robbery). This city-based research — conducted by me, Stanford researchers Matthew Bondy and Samuel Cai, and Philip J. Cook of Duke — buttresses earlier findings, rooted in state-level data, of increased violent crime.

As of 1987, 16 states and the District of Columbia banned concealed carry, and 26 states heavily restricted such carrying of weapons. (Even Texas largely banned the carrying of firearms outside the home from 1870 to 1995.) But the gun lobby has campaigned to expand the “right to carry” to every state in the union, and the resulting staggered adoption by many states of these laws aids researchers in the effort to ascertain their impact.

Our study drew on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports, from 1979 to 2019. As a first step in the study, we determined that the passage of right to carry (RTC) laws wasn’t a reaction to a rise in crimes in the cities we examined.

In some cases, we were surprised by what we did not find. Astonishingly, as more states embraced the right to carry, the rate at which Americans used a gun in response to a criminal threat didn’t budge. People confronted by criminals used guns 0.9 percent of the time, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey for 1992-2001 as well as for 2007-2011. Let that sink in: As the proportion of the U.S. population covered by RTC laws expanded to 67 percent across the nation and as the number of permits rose across almost all states, there was no increase in the likelihood that a “good guy with a gun” would defend themselves against an assailant.

[O]ur paper looked closely at the impact of RTC laws on levels of overall violent crime, as well as, separately, firearm and non-firearm crime. Whether one looked at all violent crime or specifically at homicide, robbery and aggravated assault, there was one consistent finding (although not every result was statistically significant): Overall crime always rose, and firearm-related crime rose even more significantly. . . . . the widespread carrying of guns further incentivizes criminals to make sure they are packing. The latter fact likely explains why firearm robbery showed the single highest rate of growth of any crime — a highly statistically significant increase of roughly a third.

Our paper highlighted two important costs of gun carrying that have largely been overlooked. First, RTC laws lead to a dramatic 35 percent increase in gun thefts. Police reports from around the country attribute the bulk of this theft to guns left in often unlocked cars. Our research found that the level of gun carrying in RTC states during the period we studied transferred, via theft, about 100,000 guns from “good guys” to criminals each year. With the new Supreme Court decision, that figure will grow. This free path to gun ownership is a great bonanza for criminals.

The second novel contribution of our paper is the discovery that police clearance rates for violent crimes drop as RTC policies take effect. Remarkably, we found that in the wake of RTC adoption, the ability of police to close the books on cases fell by a statistically significant 13 percent. . . . Right-to-carry laws lead to more criminals being out on the streets because they have not been identified and apprehended.

Of course, rising crime is not the only consequence of creating a situation in which many people on the street are armed. The likelihood of police shootings — both justified and unjustified — rises. When police show up at an active crime scene and find guns drawn, it is not often clear who are the miscreants, leading to tragic errors.

The myth that letting more law-abiding citizens carry firearms increases safety and decreases crime has proved stubbornly hard to dislodge, although it is refuted by many studies. Because of that myth, gun sales and gun carrying are sure to increase in previously restrictive states, But their citizens will largely be wasting money buying guns (and lugging them around), as violent crime around them increases.

[W]ith Bruen the Supreme Court has taken an important crime-fighting tool away from the few remaining states that still had restrictive gun-carry laws. It’s unarguable that the court has made the already-difficult job of fighting crime that much harder.

When will the majority of Americans rise up and say "no more" to minority rule?