Maybe a new tactic - "Crime is down, so why do you need to carry?". Except for that idiot ex-cop in the last paragraph, the article is slightly more balanced than we've become accustomed to - especially out of Massachusetts.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/128/focus/
Armed and ready - but for what?
Crime is at a record low, and still we feel unsafe
By Scot Lehigh, 5/7/2000
Gun incidents are nothing new in the Boston area, yet two recent ones stood out: In both, middle-aged, middle-class men ran afoul of a law prohibiting firearms on school campuses - one in Wellesley, the other in Framingham.
The question was obvious and immediate: Why would these men feel the need to be packing heat in the first place?
Crime in Massachusetts is, after all, at a 30-year low. And even if it weren't, speak the phrase ''mean streets,'' and the images that leap to mind are hardly the pleasant avenues of Boston's leafy western suburbs.
Neither Richard Forbes, a lawyer who lost his .32-caliber pistol in the Wellesley Middle School auditorium during a March 28 Town Meeting, nor Steven Belli, a salesman who brought his 9mm handgun onto Framingham High School grounds when he dropped his daughter off on May 1, returned Globe calls.
But if neither gun-bringer was talking, others were hotly debating why people in a safe state feel compelled to tote pistols.
Reed Hillman, former superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police and now a Republican state representative from Sturbridge, thinks the media have created an exaggerated impression of the peril crime poses in this state.
Noting that each year in Massachusetts four times as many people are killed in automobile crashes as are slain, Hillman says: ''If you covered tragedies in the proportion they take place, people would be clamoring for drunk-driving reform and not worry so much about being a crime victim. But it is much sexier when it is murder.''
Other experts agree that crime is hardly at a level that justifies the average person worrying about becoming a victim. Although figures released Friday show that homicides rose from 110 in 1998 to 120 last year, the total is still very low. Judged on homicides per 100,000 residents, Massachusetts was tied for fourth safest state in the country in 1998; only Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Dakotas were safer.
According to the Massachusetts State Police, rape is now at its lowest level since 1983, robbery its lowest since 1970, while the 1998 homicide rate was its lowest since 1962. (Aggravated assault has not declined as quickly.)
James Alan Fox, the Lipman professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, says the overall drop in crime is best seen through the homicide statistics.
In 1998, the state's homicide rate was 2.1 people for every 100,000, a halving of the 1989 high of 4.2 killings per 100,000.
And for the age groups of the two men in question, the risk is smaller still. Belli is 46; for 1998, men 35 to 49 faced a homicide risk of 1.4 in 100,000. Forbes is 54; men 50 to 64 had one chance in 100,000 of being killed.
Further, despite documented fears about school safety, nationwide the chances of a schoolchild dying in a Columbine-type killing is about one in 2 million, Fox says.
Still, he agrees with Hillman that public perceptions of crime are far different from the reality.
''Even though crime is low and going lower, half of Americans think crime is going up,'' Fox said. Why? ''The prime-time news is more like the crime-time news.''
Certainly anyone who sits through one of Channel 7's sanguinary nightly newscasts can second that sentiment.
Yet other evidence suggests reality is arresting runaway perceptions. A survey of 2,000 Boston residents released last month found that fear of crime is down 50 percent since 1995 and that 78 percent of the respondents feel safe walking near their homes at night.
A psychological factor may also help intensify unease, says Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Poussaint says that though well-adjusted people keep tragedies like Columbine and other shootings in proper statistical perspective, such carnage (two teenage boys killed 13 students and then themselves last April) can come to represent an exaggerated menace to those inclined toward paranoia.
''Someone on the paranoid side might be greatly affected,'' said Poussaint. ''A certain amount of paranoia will make you more likely to get a gun, because you fear things much more and you are projecting your own fears onto ... other people.''
Overall gun data is incomplete in Massachusetts, but according to Charles McDonald, director of communication for the Executive Office of Public Safety, there are currently 178,000 Licenses to Carry (essentially a handgun permit) in the state.
That means one of every 35 people has the right to possess, and unless the license is conditioned, to carry a handgun. Of course, a license is necessary even if one only wants to keep a pistol in his home.
Other handgun-owners carry only occasionally. Hillman, for example, says some of his friends who have handgun permits don't carry their sidearms regularly in their communities, but do strap them on if they come to Boston on a Saturday night.
Include rifles and shotguns in the count and the number of weapons goes up, though just how high is hard to say because the data is imprecise. In total, about 1 million firearms-identification cards, necessary to own a rifle or shotgun, have been issued in Massachusetts, but because those permits were, until recently, issued for a lifetime rather than renewed, that total probably overcounts the number who own firearms.
Few issues so lend themselves to diametrically opposed views of crime and causality as do guns, of course. Which is why, if gun opponents are puzzled by some people's desire to carry a handgun in a safe state, gun advocates claim it makes eminent good sense.
''I really don't know if it would be fair to say that because crime is going down someone will be less likely to carry a firearm, when the fact that they have been carrying firearms is part of the reason crime is going down,'' says Michael Yacino, executive director of the Gun Owners' Action League.
Adding ordnance to that argument is the 1998 book, ''More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws'' by John R. Lott Jr., now the senior research scholar at Yale Law School and former chief economist at the US Sentencing Commission, which reworked federal sentencing rules.
Lott's research, one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of gun laws, analyzed the effects on crime in 23 states that have made it easier to carry concealed weapons since 1985. (Most, though not all, handgun permits issued in Massachusetts allowed the concealed carrying of the weapon.)
His conclusion was that after those laws passed, homicides fell an average of 8 percent, rapes 5 percent, and aggravated assaults 7 percent. The decrease in crime continued the longer the right-to-carry laws remained on the books, he says.
As one might expect, Lott's book has touched off more debate, with critics challenging, though hardly outright discrediting, his statistical analysis.
Still, asked about the cases making headlines in Massachusetts, Lott said the men in question don't seem to fit the profile of those he thinks would most logically want to carry a gun.
''The biggest benefits are for people who are weaker physically - women or the elderly - and for poor blacks who live in high-crime urban areas,'' Lott said.
But aside from the legal charges that may entangle Forbes and Belli for bringing guns onto school property, Lott says other citizens shouldn't look askance at them for carrying guns.
''In some sense, one should be thankful that these people are bearing the cost of carrying a concealed gun,'' he says. ''If some type of attack arose, those people might be there to help out. So they are producing benefits for others, too.''
That sort of contention provokes vigorous disagreement from other specialists on crime statistics. Fox, for example, says the primary reason for the increase in violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s was ''a juvenile arms race,'' just as one of the principal causes of the decline since then was that ''we have made some real inroads and progress in trying to disarm young offenders.''
And as for Hillman, though he carried a gun for 25 years as a Massachusetts state trooper, he says he took it off the day he left the state police. So what advice does he have for today's pistol packers?
''I say, unless you are a cop or are in the business of arresting dangerous felons in the middle of the night, you don't need to carry a gun in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,'' Hillman said. ''It is a safe place to be.''
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 5/7/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/128/focus/
Armed and ready - but for what?
Crime is at a record low, and still we feel unsafe
By Scot Lehigh, 5/7/2000
Gun incidents are nothing new in the Boston area, yet two recent ones stood out: In both, middle-aged, middle-class men ran afoul of a law prohibiting firearms on school campuses - one in Wellesley, the other in Framingham.
The question was obvious and immediate: Why would these men feel the need to be packing heat in the first place?
Crime in Massachusetts is, after all, at a 30-year low. And even if it weren't, speak the phrase ''mean streets,'' and the images that leap to mind are hardly the pleasant avenues of Boston's leafy western suburbs.
Neither Richard Forbes, a lawyer who lost his .32-caliber pistol in the Wellesley Middle School auditorium during a March 28 Town Meeting, nor Steven Belli, a salesman who brought his 9mm handgun onto Framingham High School grounds when he dropped his daughter off on May 1, returned Globe calls.
But if neither gun-bringer was talking, others were hotly debating why people in a safe state feel compelled to tote pistols.
Reed Hillman, former superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police and now a Republican state representative from Sturbridge, thinks the media have created an exaggerated impression of the peril crime poses in this state.
Noting that each year in Massachusetts four times as many people are killed in automobile crashes as are slain, Hillman says: ''If you covered tragedies in the proportion they take place, people would be clamoring for drunk-driving reform and not worry so much about being a crime victim. But it is much sexier when it is murder.''
Other experts agree that crime is hardly at a level that justifies the average person worrying about becoming a victim. Although figures released Friday show that homicides rose from 110 in 1998 to 120 last year, the total is still very low. Judged on homicides per 100,000 residents, Massachusetts was tied for fourth safest state in the country in 1998; only Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Dakotas were safer.
According to the Massachusetts State Police, rape is now at its lowest level since 1983, robbery its lowest since 1970, while the 1998 homicide rate was its lowest since 1962. (Aggravated assault has not declined as quickly.)
James Alan Fox, the Lipman professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, says the overall drop in crime is best seen through the homicide statistics.
In 1998, the state's homicide rate was 2.1 people for every 100,000, a halving of the 1989 high of 4.2 killings per 100,000.
And for the age groups of the two men in question, the risk is smaller still. Belli is 46; for 1998, men 35 to 49 faced a homicide risk of 1.4 in 100,000. Forbes is 54; men 50 to 64 had one chance in 100,000 of being killed.
Further, despite documented fears about school safety, nationwide the chances of a schoolchild dying in a Columbine-type killing is about one in 2 million, Fox says.
Still, he agrees with Hillman that public perceptions of crime are far different from the reality.
''Even though crime is low and going lower, half of Americans think crime is going up,'' Fox said. Why? ''The prime-time news is more like the crime-time news.''
Certainly anyone who sits through one of Channel 7's sanguinary nightly newscasts can second that sentiment.
Yet other evidence suggests reality is arresting runaway perceptions. A survey of 2,000 Boston residents released last month found that fear of crime is down 50 percent since 1995 and that 78 percent of the respondents feel safe walking near their homes at night.
A psychological factor may also help intensify unease, says Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Poussaint says that though well-adjusted people keep tragedies like Columbine and other shootings in proper statistical perspective, such carnage (two teenage boys killed 13 students and then themselves last April) can come to represent an exaggerated menace to those inclined toward paranoia.
''Someone on the paranoid side might be greatly affected,'' said Poussaint. ''A certain amount of paranoia will make you more likely to get a gun, because you fear things much more and you are projecting your own fears onto ... other people.''
Overall gun data is incomplete in Massachusetts, but according to Charles McDonald, director of communication for the Executive Office of Public Safety, there are currently 178,000 Licenses to Carry (essentially a handgun permit) in the state.
That means one of every 35 people has the right to possess, and unless the license is conditioned, to carry a handgun. Of course, a license is necessary even if one only wants to keep a pistol in his home.
Other handgun-owners carry only occasionally. Hillman, for example, says some of his friends who have handgun permits don't carry their sidearms regularly in their communities, but do strap them on if they come to Boston on a Saturday night.
Include rifles and shotguns in the count and the number of weapons goes up, though just how high is hard to say because the data is imprecise. In total, about 1 million firearms-identification cards, necessary to own a rifle or shotgun, have been issued in Massachusetts, but because those permits were, until recently, issued for a lifetime rather than renewed, that total probably overcounts the number who own firearms.
Few issues so lend themselves to diametrically opposed views of crime and causality as do guns, of course. Which is why, if gun opponents are puzzled by some people's desire to carry a handgun in a safe state, gun advocates claim it makes eminent good sense.
''I really don't know if it would be fair to say that because crime is going down someone will be less likely to carry a firearm, when the fact that they have been carrying firearms is part of the reason crime is going down,'' says Michael Yacino, executive director of the Gun Owners' Action League.
Adding ordnance to that argument is the 1998 book, ''More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws'' by John R. Lott Jr., now the senior research scholar at Yale Law School and former chief economist at the US Sentencing Commission, which reworked federal sentencing rules.
Lott's research, one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of gun laws, analyzed the effects on crime in 23 states that have made it easier to carry concealed weapons since 1985. (Most, though not all, handgun permits issued in Massachusetts allowed the concealed carrying of the weapon.)
His conclusion was that after those laws passed, homicides fell an average of 8 percent, rapes 5 percent, and aggravated assaults 7 percent. The decrease in crime continued the longer the right-to-carry laws remained on the books, he says.
As one might expect, Lott's book has touched off more debate, with critics challenging, though hardly outright discrediting, his statistical analysis.
Still, asked about the cases making headlines in Massachusetts, Lott said the men in question don't seem to fit the profile of those he thinks would most logically want to carry a gun.
''The biggest benefits are for people who are weaker physically - women or the elderly - and for poor blacks who live in high-crime urban areas,'' Lott said.
But aside from the legal charges that may entangle Forbes and Belli for bringing guns onto school property, Lott says other citizens shouldn't look askance at them for carrying guns.
''In some sense, one should be thankful that these people are bearing the cost of carrying a concealed gun,'' he says. ''If some type of attack arose, those people might be there to help out. So they are producing benefits for others, too.''
That sort of contention provokes vigorous disagreement from other specialists on crime statistics. Fox, for example, says the primary reason for the increase in violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s was ''a juvenile arms race,'' just as one of the principal causes of the decline since then was that ''we have made some real inroads and progress in trying to disarm young offenders.''
And as for Hillman, though he carried a gun for 25 years as a Massachusetts state trooper, he says he took it off the day he left the state police. So what advice does he have for today's pistol packers?
''I say, unless you are a cop or are in the business of arresting dangerous felons in the middle of the night, you don't need to carry a gun in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,'' Hillman said. ''It is a safe place to be.''
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 5/7/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.