http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm...w&id=D8A4N5MO0

I'm not claiming this is representative of permit holders. It's more for the folks who like to claim that no permit holder has ever been charged with a gun-related crime, despite ample proof to the contrary.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

I don't know if anyone has ever claimed that no permit holder has ever been charged with a gun-related crime. However, I would like to see good statistics regarding permit holders who prevented a crime. The following excerpt from your link is quite telling, IMO.

That's kind of amazing considering all the gloom and doom predictions.

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

12th Man......do you recall in Texas a few years back the guy who rammed his truck into a restaurant and went in and started picking everyone off one-by-one? I can't remember where exactly now. Somewhere in south central Texas, I think. Anyway......before that, I never really saw the need for a concealed weapon law....but after that, I was very much for it. IF only one person, hiding under a table that morning had a gun, they could have taken him out and saved an awful lot of innocent people. As it was, they were ALL totally helpless.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

You are talking about the Luby's massacre in Waco. A young woman was there with her parents. She sometimes carried a gun, but this day she left it in her glovebox. I don't remember about her mother, but she watched her father die. She testified when the Texas legislature was considering the right to carry law. As she hid under the table watching this lunatic pick off people at random, she would have had many opportunities to kill the guy.

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

Yeah.....that's the one. Such a sad, sad case. One can only imagine feeling that helpless.

BTW, I don't carry a gun....neither does my husband. But I sure don't blame those who do.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

...squirrel finds a nut sometimes. What's your point?

Like others here, I'm not aware of a sane source who has claimed that. From FBI agents to cops walking the beat, even law enforcement officers have been known to commit crimes.

The claim I've read, and supported myself, is that concealed carry laws have not been linked to statistically significant rises in murder or violent crime rates. I don't know that there is a cause & effect, but there is certainly a correlation between concealed carry laws and decreases in violent crime rates in many areas.

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"Tweeter was a Boyscout before she went to Vietnam and found out the hard way... nobody gives a d@mn."

http://www.tsra.com/arrests.htm

http://home.wi.rr.com/ccw4wi/nra.html

It's obvious that crime went down. If you were a carjacker wouldn't it make you think twice? I really want to see stats for concealed licensed handguns used in justified shootings. I'm looking for it.

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

I'm relatively neutral on concealed-carry. I didn't feel unsafe before, and I don't feel unsafe after. My main gripe with the Minnesota law is that every office, restaurant, church and other semi-public place, including my child's elementary school, has to put up a "no guns allowed" sign if they don't want guns on the premises. I also prefer to see fairly clear and strict rules about when someone can shoot and when they can't. If you recall, my concern with the recent Florida law expanding the right to shoot was that it contained few if any restrictions -- unlike, say, Texas law.

But as regards the "crime went down", crime generally went down across the board in recent years, even in states with strict gun-control laws. I've seen studies that show crime went down FASTER in non-conceal states.

Crime is so bound up in other problems -- the economy, education, parenting -- that it's really hard to lay much cause and effect at the feet of conceal carry.

I think what really irritates me about conceal carry discussions is not so much whether people should be able to carry weapons, but the "crime is rampant" argument that underlies many pushes for conceal-carry -- despite stats showing that per capita crime is at record or near-record lows.

Edit: Regarding the TSRA study: since one of the requirements to get a permit is no criminal record, of course crime among permit holders is going to be lower than the general population. A more telling statistic would be to compare permit holders with Texans who could legally get a permit but do not.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.