LETTERS: RIGHT-TO-CARRY HAS WORKED

To the editor:

As a subscriber to your paper, I am disappointed in the lack of balanced reporting in the Feb. 19 cover article, "Concealed-guns under fire." The article covered idle speculation by opponents to the concealed-weapons bill yet ignored any real data on the issue. To quote from the article, Scott County Sheriff Bill Ferrell "said the right-to-carry law could create disaster." The article fails to mention that 31 states currently have right-to-carry laws, and just the opposite has happened in those states.

Right-to-carry has worked exceptionally well in the states that currently trust their citizens to carry firearms for self defense. In fact, according to FBI statistics, states with right-to-carry laws average lower overall violent crime rates than states without such laws. According to the most comprehensive study of its type ever by Professor John Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago, if those states that did not have right-to-carry provisions (Missouri being one) had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly. (These data are available in Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime.") Overall, in states that adopt right-to-carry laws, murders are reduced by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent and aggravated assaults by 7 percent.

According to a survey of convicted felons conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, 57 percent of surveyed convicts said they were more worried about their victims' being armed than being caught by the police. Forty percent of these criminals said they had decided at least once not to commit a crime because a victim might be armed. (These data are in the book "Armed and Considered Dangerous" by James Wright and Peter Rossi.)On April 6, Missouri voters will be voting on the right-to-carry bill, Proposition B. If passed, Proposition B will affirm the right of law-abiding residents to protect themselves and their families outside the home. As is evidenced by the drop in violent crime in the 31 states with right-to-carry laws, the only people who should oppose this bill are the criminals.

I encourage your readers to cast a vote against crime on April 6 and vote yes on Proposition B.

TREY BLOODWORTH

Jackson