Oh, look. Another Johns Hopkins study examining the effects of recognizing human/civil rights.
Changes in state policies impact fatal and non-fatal assaults of law enforcement officers
The researchers looked at the relationship between assault data involving law enforcement officers and changes in three policies at the state level: three-strikes laws, which impose mandatory decades-long sentences when a criminal is convicted of a third crime; right-to-carry or concealed-carry laws, which reduce restrictions for individuals to carry concealed firearms in public; and permit-to-purchase measures, which require prospective handgun purchasers to obtain a permit or license after passing a background check.
And what did they find?
The authors found that three-strikes laws were associated with a 33 percent increase in the risk of fatal assaults of law enforcement officers and a 62 percent increase in fatal non-handgun assaults.
[…]
“In the case of three-strikes laws, it appears that chronic offenders may be killing officers to evade capture and possible life imprisonment,” Crifasi says.
Surprise, surprise. Back when I was a peace officer, we predicted exactly that.
What about right to carry/concealed carry?
Previous research has examined the link between right-to-carry or concealed-carry gun laws on fatal assaults in the general population. The Bloomberg School study is believed to be the first to examine the effects of these laws on both fatal and non-fatal assaults of law enforcement officers and found no associations between the laws and either type of assault against officers.
Probably because lawful carriers are usually the type…
Oh. Wait.
“Many of those most likely to commit firearm violence are prohibited from possessing firearms and therefore unable to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun.”
Who’d a thunk it? People who go to all the trouble of background checks and licenses don’t attack cops.
And permits to purchase?
The number of officers who died in Missouri is too small to make any conclusions about fatal assaults.
[…]
[Connecticut’s] association was also not statistically significant due to the rarity of these deaths.
Again, the folks prone to shooting cops (see above re:three strikes) don’t bother with permits they couldn’t get anyway. Now, if they’d been honest and tried to correlate straw purchase prosecutions with officer attacks, they might’ve seen something. But probably “not statistically significant.”
For the anti-gun Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, even allowing for the spin, that’s an amazing admission. They can’t possibly leave it at that, right?
Right.
Although the rates of fatal assaults on law enforcement officers have declined over the past several decades, their homicide rates are consistently higher than that of the general population and higher compared with other public service occupations. Most of the fatal assaults against law enforcement officers are committed by firearm.
In fact, the civilian homicide rate for 2013 was 4.6 per 100K. The cops? 5.3 per 100K. As Reason notes, 3.3/100K if you exclude two accidental shootings. For 2014, the CDC says the overall homicide rate in the US was 5.19 per 100K. Frankly, any difference between civilian and LEO homicide rates is “not statistically significant.”
If Johns Hopkins was honest, that press release would have been titled,“Most changes in state policies DON’T impact fatal and non-fatal assaults of law enforcement officers.” But being Johns Hopkins, they had to lump in restrictions on honest folk to demonize gun owners by association.
Your tax dollars at work.
This sort of thing is why, as much as I’d like to kill rapists…I don’t support the death penalty for rape (with one important caveat). Too many rapists would simply kill the one person who can serve as witness in their capital-punishment trial.
(The important caveat, of course, is that if the victim kills her (or his) attacker at the time…I’ve got no problem with that.)
And just think of how much lower the homicide rates would be if there was an end to the “war” on drugs, guns, raw milk… essentially, the government war on people.
Is homicide a disease? No. So I guess we are being made used to the idea of the CDC labeling whole segments of society as “ill” for the purposes of governmental control. This shindig is lovely, is it not?
The CDC was seriously pushing “gun violence is a communicable disease” which is why they got their hands
slappedgently tapped and the law specifically forbade the CDC advocating or promoting gun control. In the last year or so, that bogus argiument has been pushed again, to the point that the People’s Pacifistic Paradise of Kalifornia is discussing funding their own “gun violence” research center to do “what the horrible Republicans won’t let the ffederal government do.”Now, if they’d been honest and tried to correlate straw purchase prosecutions with officer attacks, they might’ve seen something. But probably “not statistically significant.”
Considering the number of straw purchase prosecutions is shamefully small, it almost certainly is “not statistically significant.”
Why should buying a gun for someone else be a problem at all? Why just for guns? It is the gun control crap that even makes this an issue. All this tracking of where guns come from and so forth is control freak stuff, nothing to do with actual crime. Otherwise, they’d be tracking each match, knife, razor blade and everything else. Oh wait, they’d LOVE to do that, but it’s almost impossible.
The tool is not the important part of a crime… it’s the criminals – those who actually want to hurt other people and take their stuff. Which is why we prepare to defend ourselves, no matter what tools the criminals choose… or how they get them.
The controllers just don’t like the competition. 🙂
“Why should buying a gun for someone else be a problem at all? ”
It shouldn’t be, of course. Ironically, if it weren’t a problem, it would probably happen a lot less commonly, since the usual reason for it is to have someone who won’t fail a background check, go through the background check.
Of course, trying to make this a crime brings up silliness, like having to exempt bona-fide gifting, then running into problems defining that.
And of course one situation where a gun was bought for someone else *to obtain an LE discount* and then transferred through the process, WITH the background check done on the eventual purchaser (in other words, evading the background check was NOT the motive)…was deemed a straw purchase and prosecuted. For no real reason, and honestly not even for a “gun control” reason (since the eventual purchaser was recorded) but just so the ATF could demonstrate what shit-sucking assholes they could be.
This law is necessarily vague…because, if I buy a gun for myself, decide it’s a piece of shit and someone offers to take it off my hands a week later…how is that detectably different from me buying the gun with the intention of selling it to someone else? Apparently, if they give you the money before the purchase, that’s it. Well gee, I guess I can get around the law by just not being so fucking broke I can’t front a few hundred bucks for Joe The Thug.
It’s just stupid, no matter how you approach it. And that’s leaving aside that it’s ALSO a violation of individual liberties.