Reality Check: More Minnesotans Own Guns, Violent Crime at 50 Year Low

[Anti Federalist]

Reality Check: More Minnesotans Own Guns, Violent Crime Remains Low

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2018/02/15/reality-check-gun-permit-background-checks/

By Pat Kessler

February 15, 2018 at 5:35 pm

ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) — Minnesota set a record last year for the number of gun background checks the FBI conducted in the state.

More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains relatively low. WCCO’s Pat Kessler is looking at the numbers, and giving them a Reality Check.

We took a hard look at the numbers, and found: Minnesota has a high rate of gun ownership, and a relatively low rate of violent crime.

Minnesota’s violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI.

And in 2017, the state set a new record for firearms background checks.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System reports it processed nearly 683,544 checks on gun buyers in 2017. That includes: 473,975 permits, 94,383 handguns and 125,516 long guns.

Minnesota set another 2017 record, too.

The State Department of Public Safety reports 283,188 Minnesotans now have permits to legally carry firearms in public.

In 2017, the state issued 57,651 permits to carry a weapon in public. That’s down from a record 71,156 permits issued in 2016.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about guns in Minnesota. An estimated 36.7 percent of Minnesotans own at least one firearm.

But we don’t know how many total guns there are in the state, or exactly how many gun owners there are, or how much ammunition is sold every year.

 

[Zippyjuan]

States with tighter gun laws saw declines in crime over the last 50 years. States with looser gun laws saw reductions in crime. Is it because of gun laws?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-caused-the-crime-decline/477408/

In the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates had been on a steep upward climb since the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency. The crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s added fuel to the fire, and handgun-related homicides more than doubled between 1985 and 1990. That year, murders peaked in New York City with 2,245 killings. Politicians embraced tough-on-crime platforms and enacted harshly punitive policies. Experts warned the worst could be yet to come.

Then crime rates went down. And then they kept going down.

By decade’s end, the homicide rate plunged 42 percent nationwide. Violent crime decreased by one-third. What turned into a precipitous decline started later in some areas and took longer in others. But it happened everywhere: in each region of the country, in cities large and small, in rural and urban areas alike. In the Northeast, which reaped the largest benefits, the homicide rate was halved. Murders plummeted by 75 percent in New York City alone as the city entered the new millennium.

The trend kept ticking downward from there, more slowly and with some fluctuations, to the present day. By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.

But the forces that drove the Great American Crime Decline remain a mystery. Theories abound among sociologists, economists, and political scientists about the causes, with some hypotheses stronger than others. But there’s no real consensus among scholars about what caused one of the largest social shifts in modern American history.

And the trend has been global:

Crime rates rose and fell in other industrialized countries in tandem with the United States over the past 50 years.

 

[Slave Mentality]

Fast John replied first with a bunch of charts and bullshit. Color me shocked.

 

[GunnyFreedom]

LOL some random entity calls me on the telephone claims to be a poll and asks if I have any guns in my house, I'll give you one guess as to how I will respond.....

 

[pcosmar]

LOL some random entity calls me on the telephone claims to be a poll and asks if I have any guns in my house, I'll give you one guess as to how I will respond.....

I remember a time when the families guns were proudly on display in the living or dining room. In most homes.

Now people hide it..

 

[oyarde]

It makes sense that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the high murder rate .

 

[Swordsmyth]

It makes sense that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the high murder rate .

It brings new meaning to "HEY HEY HEY LBJ HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY".

 

[Danke]

Guns in Minnesota have allowed us to keep Injuns to just harvesting wild rice restricted to their reservations and doing commerce ripping off productive citizens to their casinos. It keeps the peace with such savages. We have learned from the past.

 

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

I have to agree with GunnyFreedom regarding his comment on some anonymous telephone surveyor.

Firearms Numbers in the United States 1945 - 2012

The U.S. population increased from 133 million in 1945 to 313 million in 2012, a 135% increase in population, or over a 200% increase in the number of guns per capita. Guns per capita rose from .35 in 1945, to 1.1 guns per capita in 2012.

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2015/06/firearms-numbers-in-united-states-1945.html