Concealed-carry handgun permits soar as murder rate drops, study claims

A report from a prominent economist finds that the number of permits to carry concealed handguns has skyrocketed by 178 percent in the last eight years, even as the murder rate has dropped.The figures, cited in a study by the Philadelphia-based Crime Prevention Research Center, is evidence that legally-possessed handguns deter crime, rather than contribute to it, according to the center’s president, John Lott, an author and Fox News contributor who has held teaching and research positions at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Yale and the University of Chicago. He said the huge increase in the number of permits issued to allow law-abiding Americans to pack heat shows attitudes toward firearms are changing. …read more

Source:: NRA-ILA