Concealed Handguns in Michigan Calming Thugs Down

Six years ago Michigan joined the new breed of states. It granted its citizens the right to carry concealed handguns for self-defense just for the asking (with proper training and a background check). Now, in every hundred people you run into there, one or two will be packing legally -- law-abiding citizens with guns.

And overall, violent crime has gone down. No massive numbers of road-rage shootouts. No out-of-control saloon shootouts. No blood in the streets. No OK Corral. All these things the Nervous Nellies (including Chiefs of Police, who should know better) warned about turned out, yet again, to be so much nightmare fantasy disappearing in the light of day.

I don't blame them, though. It's just that some people find it hard to trust their upstanding fellow citizens. I guess it's an idea that takes a bit of getting used to. But even if this idea of trusting one's neighbors had drifted away from America over the decades since the Sixties, it's been making a comeback. Today, forty of the fifty states are the new breed -- they will license you to carry concealed just for the asking. They trust their law-abiding citizens.

Here's how staff writer Dawson Bell put it in the Detroit Free Press a few days ago.

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold.

But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics.

The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined.

It's good to know there are a lot of well-trained responsible citizens out there in Michigan, 155,000 of them. Another example of When law-abiding citizens have guns, everyone is safer all around.