Forty-eight states allow citizens to carry guns under some circumstances. The legislature in Illinois, one of the holdouts (Wisconsin is the other one), may vote to allow licensed individuals to carry concealed handguns, and the gun-control advocates are trotting out their usual horror stories. The trouble is, none of the claims they've made in the past have actually come to pass:
The problem for opponents is that they have sown fear from the beginning, only to harvest a meager crop. A generation ago, few states allowed concealed-carry. When Florida captured national attention by legalizing it in 1987, critics forecast mass carnage. When other states followed suit, the same predictions were heard.
But they turned out to be false alarms. Instead of an epidemic of violence, the nation saw a drop. Since 1991, the murder rate has been cut nearly in half. You don't have to believe that "shall-issue" laws caused the decline to grasp that they certainly didn't get in the way.
The record of the past two decades demonstrates that you can strengthen the right of law-abiding adults to protect themselves against crime without making the world more dangerous. That knowledge is helpful in Illinois, to those willing to learn from experience.
Lots of numbers in the full article, good read.
