We are not the people you should be afraid of

The Texas Department of Public Safety keeps track of conviction rates for Texas Concealed Handgun License holders. You can see all the published reports so far, and here’s the 2011 list (latest as of this writing).

While it’s evident CHL holders are not immune from doing bad things, the data does support the notion that CHL holders are an extremely law-abiding bunch – far and above the citizenry as a whole.

Here’s some number crunching:

The number of CHL holders that commit murder or manslaughter is remarkably low. From the DPS reports for 1996 through 2011, the number of murder and manslaughter convictions for CHL holders totaled 30 over the 16 years.

DPS also reports on the number of active CHL holders for each year. Those numbers were totaled to obtain the number of CHL holder-years. The total number of CHL holder-years for the 1996-2011 is 4,295,434.

The two numbers give us the ratio of CHL holder convictions for murder and manslaughter per 100,000 CHL holders per year. That number is .70/100,000.

Yes, the decimal point is in the correct place.

The rate of murder and manslaughter for the general population of Texas averaged for the years 1996-2011 is 6.0/100,000.

If such is the case, why do you think we’re the people you need to stop? Why are you afraid of us? We’re demonstrably more law-abiding and statistically less likely to commit a crime. Aren’t we the very sort of people you desire?