Firearms Training

Dave Workman, Seattle Gun Rights Examiner

Pacific Northwest gun rights activists tracking firearms issues nationwide are taking note of a report in Sunday’s Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch that shows how crime in bars and restaurants has actually dropped in the year since Virginia changed the law to allow concealed firearms in those establishments.

It’s the kind of revelation that causes gun prohibitionists to clench their teeth because: a) it appears in the mainstream press, which has a long history of supporting gun control and the prohibitionist agenda, and b) it further erodes the credibility of such extremist organizations as the Brady Campaign and state-level affiliates like Washington CeaseFire. One might argue, however, that the second dilemma is one of their own making.

The number of major crimes involving firearms at bars and restaurants statewide declined 5.2 percent from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, compared with the fiscal year before the law went into effect, according to crime data compiled by Virginia State Police at the newspaper’s request.–Richmond Times-Dispatch

Had gun control proponents not manufactured hysteria with their repeated predictions of Wild West shootouts and blood flowing in the streets, they would not appear to be such fools when the data comes in. […]

The same thing recently happened in Michigan, courtesy of the Detroit Free Press and crack reporter Dawson Bell. As this column noted when the Detroit newspaper recently tracked ten years of concealed carry reform in the Wolverine State and found no evidence of the rising crime and mayhem that was predicted back in 2001, anti-gunners were left trying to dance around with semantics when facts about lawful concealed carry revealed their predictions to have been so much hot air.

David Rittgers, an attorney and decorated former Army special forces officer who is now a legal policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the growing number of states that are adopting concealed-carry measures like Virginia’s have seen no appreciable rise — and in some cases a decline — in violent crime.

“The worst that you can say about these laws is that they are statistically value neutral” in terms of impacting the crime rate, Rittgers said.

Rittgers said states that have enacted such concealed-carry legislation — “even when they’ve done some relatively restrictive provisions upfront” — have relaxed those over time “because of the lack of violent incidents that might be connected with persons carrying concealed (weapons) with a permit.”–Richmond Times-Dispatch

What the Times-Dispatch story also revealed is something Evergreen State gun rights activists have long known to be true: People who shoot up bars or gun down other people outside of nightclubs typically do not have concealed pistol licenses. More often than not, the perpetrators of these crimes are convicted felons who cannot legally possess firearms, or they are under age 21, so they cannot legally carry a handgun. Either way, they are not good guys.

Only two fatal shootings occurred during the last fiscal year — one outside a Petersburg nightclub and the other at a Radford restaurant — but neither involved concealed-gun permit holders. And only two of the 18 aggravated assaults reported could be linked definitively to concealed-carry holders.–Richmond Times-Dispatch

Case in point was the now-infamous Skyway shooter, taken down by a legally-armed private citizen. Jarvais Steven Warren, 27, allegedly shot Richard Breazeale over some bad heroin, using a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol that ran dry before Warren encountered Jeffrey Fletcher in the parking lot of a Skyway bank. There has been no indication that Mr. Warren had a valid CPL.

While gun prohibitionists would have everyone believing that all people who carry firearms are the same, quite the opposite is true. Law-abiding citizens typically do not find themselves in trouble for misusing guns. This much was made clear by Bell in the two-part Free Press series.

As this column reported, a record number of Washingtonians now have CPLs and there is every indication the number will continue to climb, while the credibility of gun prohibitionist groups continues to fall.