Data not definitive, but is the state heading in the wrong direction?
The finer points:
- Wisconsin's murder rate shoots up from 2011 to 2012
- Gun advocates previous claims of concealed carry making us safer comes into question
On November 1, 2011, Wisconsin officially became the 49th state to legalize concealed carry.
That means that the year 2012 was the first full year that concealed carry was the law in Wisconsin, where citizens could legally, with a permit, carry guns and other weapons on their persons.
Prior to the concealed carry law being enacted, I wrote a blog post on the necessity of stronger regulations, specifically to the training that goes into obtaining a license:
An argument often made in the gun debate is that more guns make people safer. While the evidence suggests that, at the very least, gun ownership doesn't equate violence, it's tough to assume guns necessarily make us safer on their own. These guns are heavily regulated, whether concealed or not, tracked to ensure that the people who use them are found immediately following their use. Guns are safer, it seems, with stronger regulations attached to them.
The answer? There’s nothing in the statistical analysis that can be definitive. There’s no strong evidence, one way or another, that can link concealed carry to a rise or fall in crime rates. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and it’s much too soon to be making any generalization in one way or another based on the new law on its own.
But it’s interesting to note one aspect of the statistics, available through the FBI website: crime in Wisconsin actually went up, statewide. And it’s not only in Milwaukee, but in the state at-large as well.
Violent crime in Wisconsin in 2011 was at 236.914 incidents per 100,000 citizens. In 2012, that rate increased to 280.525 per 100,000, an increase of 18.4 percent.
The rates of murders and aggravated assaults also increased in the state from year-to-year, by 26.8 percent and 29.1 percent, respectively.
Milwaukee continues to be the city with the most murders in the state, and notably crime has increased there as well. Indeed, Forbes recently named Milwaukee the tenth most dangerous city in the nation (among cities with populations exceeding 200,000, excluding Chicago because they collect records differently).
But homicides in Milwaukee climbed only slightly as compared to the state as-a-whole, by 6.7 percent. That means that, although Milwaukee still has the highest homicide rate in the state, the murder rate climbed faster outside of its jurisdiction (the rest of the state) than it did inside.
Indeed, if you subtract the population of Milwaukee and its murders for the years of 2011 and 2012, Wisconsin saw its homicide rate shoot up, increasing its rate of murder per 100,000 by more than 60 percent.
Like I said before, none of this data can definitively tell us whether concealed carry had an adverse or positive affect on crime in Wisconsin. More years of evidence is needed before such a conclusion can be reached.
Still, it’s interesting to look at this data and wonder, which direction is Wisconsin heading in? If this year’s data is any indicator of what the future holds, the promise of “less crime under concealed carry” seems to be a floundering one.