By Selwyn Duke

Gun-control laws have been killed off in the Missouri legislature in recent years, and more residents are being killed in the streets. That’s the story, anyway.

One of the storytellers is Jonathan M. Metzl, professor of sociology and psychiatry and the director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. After outlining loosened Missouri gun restrictions, such as easing prohibitions on concealed and open carry and eliminating municipalities’ power to enact their own gun control, he writes:

What followed was a state of affairs that the New York Times has described as a “natural experiment” testing whether more guns led to more safety and less crime.

Instead, according to research, the opposite occurred, in as much as gun deaths soared when it became easier for people to buy and carry firearms.

A team of researchers led by Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, analyzed extensive crime data from Missouri and found that the state’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase handgun law “was associated with a 25 percent increase in firearm homicides rates.” Between 2008 and 2014 the Missouri gun homicide rate rose to 47 percent higher than the national average. 

This sounds like a smoking gun for anti-Second Amendment-rights activists. But it’s more like a cherry-picked misfire.

Read the rest here.