Gun deregulation hasn't made us safer -- crime has gone up in Wisconsin

Gwen Moore predicts Walker's gun deregulations will result in more crime. That may already be true.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) recently penned a widely-read op-ed about guns, Scott Walker, and the inevitable rise of violent crime because of the governor’s attitudes on deregulation of weapons.

Her words are eloquent and prophetic; anyone with the time to do so ought to read the piece, which foretells the problems that will come about because of the rapid changes to gun laws in our state.

“Unfortunately for our constituents, Gov. Walker has made it abundantly clear that the concerns of Wisconsin residents will always take a backseat to those of the extreme pro-gun groups that have spent millions of dollars supporting him,” Moore wrote.

Her prediction that crime will rise as gun laws are deregulated is entirely plausible. In fact, it might have already happened.

Following Gov. Scott Walker’s signing of the concealed carry law in the state of Wisconsin at the end of 2011, he made a very strongly-worded assessment for the state:

”By signing concealed carry into law today we are making Wisconsin safer for all responsible, law abiding citizens,” he said in a statement.

But what Walker thought would happen and what actually happened are far from each other. The state didn’t get safer overall -- violent crime, in fact, increased in the state, by a rate of 14 percent from 2011 to 2013.

In 2011, the last year before concealed carry was implemented in the state, Wisconsin had a violent crime rate of 236 incidents per 100,000 citizens. In 2012 that went up to 280 incidents per 100,000. In 2013 it improved a little, but was still way above the 2011 number, coming in at 271 incidents per 100,000.

Contrast that to the years immediately before concealed carry and you’ll see a significant change:

What we see is that violent crime was actually going down before concealed carry was put into place. After it was implemented violent crime went up.

This is the exact opposite of what Walker had promised -- rather than making Wisconsin safer, the state went in the opposite direction.

Concealed carry may not have made the state more violent; but it certainly didn’t play a role in making it safer, as Walker had asserted it would. Otherwise, we’d have seen a positive change in the violent crime rate.

We didn’t see that at all -- we saw more crime.

It seems the new data on gun proximity is true: more guns is resulting in more crime, especially in Wisconsin.