Sorry, gun control advocates: gun control does not work

Whenever a pro gun control study comes out, the media is quick to pick up the story. Even FOX news, claimed to be a conservative beacon, picked up on the story. The Washington Post also published a much longer, in depth story on the study. 

The study, published by scholars from The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, concluded that gun licensing laws reduced homicides by 40% in ten years. According to the study, permit to purchase (PTP) laws "may reduce firearm-specific homicides." Unfortunately for the left, the study is bogus. 

According to Economist John Lott: 

As the authors of the study note, from 1995 to 2005 the firearm homicide rate in Connecticut indeed fell from 3.13 to 1.88 per 100,000 people, representing a 40% drop over a ten-year period (“We estimate that the law was associated with a 40% reduction in Connecticut’s firearm homicide rates during the first 10 years that the law was in place“). However, unexplained is that the firearms homicide rate was falling even faster immediately prior to the licensing law. From 1993 to 1995, the Connecticut firearms homicide rate fell from 4.5 to 3.13 per 100,000 residents, which means more than a 30% drop in just two years. This represented a greater decline than the 17% national decline over those two years. Of course, Rudolph and his co-authors do not address this inconvenient fact (though if one looks at their Figure 1 on page 3 this preceding drop is clearly visible). ... Their results are also extremely sensitive to the last year that they pick. ... The longer samples show a relative increase in Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate whether Rudolph et al. had looked at one additional year or five additional years. ... The Webster study also cherry-picks what crime rates to look at. For over all violent crimes as well as robbery and aggravated assault, Connecticut’s crime rate was falling relative to the rest of the US in the years prior to the licensing law and rising afterwards. For murder, there is basically not change in trends before and after the licensing law.

More criticisms of the study are in the link above. 

Sorry, liberals, but the research you use is bogus again. Gun control does not work. And there is one point Lott made not in the quote above: the study looks at one state. But that makes no sense when 10 other states have similar laws. When Lott did his concealed carry research, he looked at *every single* county, state, and city. Increasing the sample makes a better study with more accurate results. Choosing one state is the definition of cherry picking; gun laws don't work. But law abiding citizens with firearms do work.