“Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent 1 million robberies, murders and rapes every year,” John Pierce, a Virginia-based gun-rights activist with opencarry.org, told MSNBC.com.

Monday, March 29, 2010 By Joe Schoffstall

(CNSNews.com) – A new report published by MSNBC.com shows that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens results in fewer deaths from the use of firearms.

“Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent 1 million robberies, murders and rapes every year,” John Pierce, a Virginia-based gun-rights activist with opencarry.org, told MSNBC.com.

Alan M. Gottlieb, vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), called the finding “further evidence that everything the gun prohibitionists have been claiming and predicted over the past two decades has been fundamentally fraudulent.”

However, not everyone shares the sentiment of those pushing for laws that allow open carry and concealed carry.  Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group, said the movement for more open-carry and concealed-carry gun laws “has to do with selling more guns.”

While it was pushed by groups like the National Rifle Association, it also “dovetailed with the gun industry’s desperate need to find a new market,” she said.

The MSNBC.com report, Record numbers now licensed to pack heat, says that in the 1980s and 1990s, Americans were killed by guns at a rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population, at the time the concealed-carry movement (carrying a handgun or other weapon in public in a concealed manner, either on one’s person or close proximity) began gaining momentum.

In this decade, the gun-homicide rate has fallen to 4.07 per 100,000, which equates to a 28 percent reduction in homicides with the use of firearms. This decline in homicides follows a five-fold increase in a “shall-issue” (requirement of a permit to carry a concealed handgun, but where the granting of the permit is subject only to meeting certain criteria laid out in the law) and unrestricted concealed-carry laws in states from 1986 to 2006, reported MSNBC.com.

According to federal background checks conducted on the sale of most firearms, the decline in homicides comes as U.S. firearm sales are skyrocketing.

FULL STORY

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