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At 6 months, impact of gun law is unclear
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
At 6 months, impact of gun law is unclear January 4, 2002BY BRIAN DICKERSONFREE PRESS COLUMNISTOn July 1, county gun boards across Michigan began handing out concealed weapon permits to most law-abiding applicants who passed a gun safety course. Now, six months and 21,000 newly pistol-packin' neighbors later, are we feeling safer? Ross Dykman is. He's the director of the Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners, one of several groups that lobbied for the controversial right-to-carry law. Dykman concedes that it's too early to document what, if any, impact Michigan's new CCW rules are having on crime rates here. But he says he feels vindicated by a Michigan State Police compilation indicating that counties have issued fewer new permits than some of the new law's critics predicted, and by the fact that no CCW permit-holder has been accused of shooting a firearm criminally or negligently since the law took effect. Then there's the number of crimes that haven't occurred as a result of criminals becoming more cautious. But that number is hard to come by. "We're watching for those incidents," Dykman told me Thursday, "but of course you can't quantify a negative." To 1 percent and beyondFor the record, it's too soon to say whether law enforcement estimates that up to 150,000 Michigan residents would obtain permits under the liberalized CCW rules were exaggerated. The two camps don't even agree on how many permits existed before the new law took effect. David Turner, who manages firearms records for the State Police, said there were about 55,000. But Dykman said that estimate includes about 25,000 restricted CCW permits that limit where or under what circumstances the permit holder may pack heat. "We don't count those," he explained. But if you start where the MSP does, there are about 75,000 Michigan residents licensed to carry today, and another 15,000 with applications in the pipeline. If the applications continue to pour in at their current pace, it's likely that the percentage of Michigan residents licensed to carry will eventually reach the 1- to 1.5-percent level projected by MSP. Waiting for more ammunitionTurner's department will provide another progress report on Michigan's arms build-up on the new CCW law's first anniversary. In addition to the number of CCW permits sought and issued, the MSP's report will include the number of civil infractions, criminal violations and suicides attributable to permit-holders. I asked Dykman and Ingham County Prosecuting Attorney Stuart Dunnings III, a vocal critic of the new law, whether anything the MSP reports could persuade them to reconsider their positions. Not really, they admitted. "Whatever happens here in the first year, I'd have to fall back on the experience of the states that have had shall-issue laws for years," Dykman told me. Countered Dunnings: "I just believe that sooner or later there is going to be an incident where innocent people die. How many deaths are we going to accept so that more people can carry handguns?" For now, the drive to place the CCW question before voters in 2002 appears to have run out of steam. Any day, now, though, one of two things is going to happen: Either some new permit-holder is going to blow away a home invader, or the permit-holder's 6-year-old son is going to blow away his baby sister in the backseat of the family SUV. The only question is which side will find its poster child first. http://www.freep.com/news/metro/dicker4_20020104.htm Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248
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