Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence introduced their new President, Paul Helmke, in a rebuttal to Florida Governor Bush’s recent statement on the state’s decreasing crime rate:

The truth is that, across the Nation, violent crime, particularly gun crime, has been in sharp decline since the Brady Law went into effect in 1994. Weak gun laws have not made Florida a leader in fighting crime: Arguably, they have helped to make it one of the two most violent states in the Nation.[1]

 

Partial Truth Favors Brady

What Helmke does not say is that the U.S. violent crime rate began dropping two years before passing of the Brady Law. After peaking in 1991, the violent crime rate dropped 5.9% by the end of 1994, the year the Brady Law went into effect.[2] Helmke’s implication that the Brady Law helped reduce crime is self-serving and misleading. The National Academy of Science concurs: their researchers concluded that results are too inconsistent to clearly endorse the Brady Law as a crime-fighting tool.[3]

Helmke ignores Governor Bush’s main point: While Florida “weakened” its gun laws to favor law-abiding citizens, violent crime dropped.[4] Florida’s violent crime rate has been falling steadily since 1992, reached its peak in 1990, and is at the lowest level since 1978.[5] The table below compares Florida’s violent crime trend to the national trend, showing that Florida’s decrease exceeds the national trend in all categories.

Violent Crime Trends 1987-2004

   United States               Florida                      FLA  Trend Difference

Violent Crime                -24.0%                         -30.6%                         27.4%

Homicide                       -33.7%                         -52.6%                         56.0%

Rape                             -14.4%                         -24.3%                         69.2%

Robbery                        -36.0%                         -51.7%                         43.4%

Aggravated Assault        -17.5%                         -18.3%                         4.4%

 

Brady’s “Weak Gun Law” States and Violent Crime

Another Helmke claim is:

According to FBI figures, in 2004 Florida had the second highest violent crime rate of any state in the Nation. Only South Carolina, also with weak gun laws, was more violent.

 

As noted in an earlier article, gun controllers like to ignore Washington D.C. crime statistics when discussing which state is most violent, even though its population is larger than Wyoming’s.[6] Our nation’s capitol was the most violent jurisdiction in 2004, with a 75% higher violent crime rate than second-place South Carolina. Maryland was a close fourth to Florida–just a 1.5% lower violent crime rate–and it also has “strong gun laws” by Brady criteria.[7] Average the two most violent “weak gun law” and the two “strong gun law” jurisdictions, and you get equal average ratings of 2.5. (A previous paper determined that Brady’s definition of “weak gun laws” means states with right-to-carry laws.[8])

The five least violent states–North Dakota, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota–all have “weak gun laws” according to Brady criteria.[9] In 2004, RTC states had an average violent crime rate of 388.6, while Brady’s “strong gun law” (non-RTC) states rate of 491.2 was 26.4% higher. Brady’s favorite states had a 39.1% higher murder rate, a 74.8% higher robbery rate, and 15.1% higher aggravated assault rate. RTC states had a 18.9% higher rate of rape, but it is interesting to note that the rate is dropping faster in RTC states than non-RTC states: Between 1995 and 1996, 10 states enacted right-to-carry. By 2004, they experienced a 19.2% greater annual decrease in the rate of rape than the 12 non-RTC states and D.C. This occurred despite the fact that the overall violent crime rate fell faster in the non-RTC states.[10]

If Everybody Were a Concealed Carry Licensee…

Another Helmke quote highlights the inconsistent application of their own standards, in order to highlight their bias against RTC in the most ideal manner:

“Explaining and understanding increases or decreases in crime is always difficult. To argue that putting guns into our communities leads to a reduction in crime makes no sense.”

 

Between 1999 and 2004, the FBI reported that Florida’s general population had an average arrest rate of 5.72%.[11] The percentage of RTC licensees who committed any crime after licensure averaged 0.60% during the same time period:[12] the general population was arrested 9.5 times as often as RTC licensees committed violations that probably resulted in arrest. Using this as an indicator, if Florida’s general population were as law-abiding as RTC licensees, the state’s crime rate would be reduced about 90%.

This does not prove that RTC reduces crime, but it does show that licensees represent a safer, more responsible population group that requires a much lower expenditure of tax dollars on criminal justice resources. More importantly, it also justifies the right of law-abiding citizens to bear arms in public for self-defense, which is at the core of Governor Bush’s statements:

“Law abiding citizens that have guns for protection actually probably are part of the reason we have a lower crime rate.”

“The people that commit the majority of the crimes are habitual offenders. They’re the ones that commit a crime after crime after crime.”[13]

 

By Helmke’s criterion, laid out in the first sentence of his opening quote in this section, to argue that not putting guns into our communities leads to a reduction in crime also makes no sense, especially in light of the data above.

Conclusion

Even though Brady has a new president, their anti-gun message remains the same, and so is their use of emotion-based, statistically-unsupportable rhetoric. The more things change at Brady Campaign, the more they stay the same.