My friend, researcher Howard Nemerov, just published a new paper: Concealed Handgun Licensing: Asset to Texas. The abstract:
Collating conviction data reported by Texas Department of Public Safety, crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and census data, it’s possible to determine relative criminality of handgun carry licensees to their equivalent non-licensee population. This paper analyzes Texas carry licensees versus non-licensee Texans over age 21 to determine relative criminality, and also cites research enabling a comparison between police officer malfeasance and carry licensees.
For the tl;dr crowd: license holders are overwhelmingly more law-abiding than non-license holders (as a group/demographic).
A few points from 16 years of data:
- Non-licensees committed FBI major crime felonies 20 times as often as carry licensees.
- For all non-FBI crimes—other felonies and misdemeanors—non-licensees committed crime 11 times as often as carry licensees.
- Since 2006 (last 10 years) non-licensees committed non-FBI crimes 14 times as often.
Why might that be? Howard’s paper discusses it, and it’s something I wrote about over 8 years ago, because to hold a carry license in Texas says a lot about a person.
Everyone seems to worship facts, at least when facts suit their cause. Funny thing about facts: they continue to hold when they don’t suit your cause. Give Howard’s paper a read – it’s full of facts.
Stuff From Hsoi 
well, i’m not in a position to argue whether those listed items are facts are not, but given they are, they’re just not very useful facts. usually the chl figures are given in a vacuum, i.e., percentage of licensees who have committed xxx crime compared to non-licensees who have committed xxx rime.
the comparisons you shared might mean that 1000 licensees committed murders, but that 20,000 non-licensees did. which wouldn’t be a good look for us chl holders even if the nons were worse.
/guy
note that i’m just posting off the cuff in reaction to the particular ones you shared. i’ve downloaded the full report and will read it later. /guy
It’s based on the data DPS has published for the past 16 years. Give it a read.
If you’re curious about Howard’s stuff, also check out his book “400 Years of Gun Control: Why isn’t it working?”. Howard used to be anti, but then did the research and looked at facts and data. What’s especially interesting about that book’s research is he used the sources typically cited by antis, so basically giving their own data proper review. When you look at data as the data is, it’s what it is — not what you want to claim it to be or cherry pick out.