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Just to see if there’s an easy parallel to the More Guns Less Crime argument, I decided to compare the concealed carry permit issue rate to homicide rates. I found the California Dept of Justice’s page of homicide statistics per county per year. Turns out the five counties with the worst homicide rates in 2003 were:

Sierra .0286%
Inyo .0109%
Los Angeles .0107%
Mendocino .0102%
Alameda .0095%

and nine counties tied for the best, with no homicides in 2003:

Alpine
Amador
Colusa
Del Norte
Lassen
Marin
Mariposa
Modoc

There were two big surprises for me in those lists - that Sierra County turned out to have the worst rate, and that Marin County had no homicides in 2003. Looking at both counties over the longer time periods shown in the CA DOJ statistics, it looks like both entries are statistical outliers.

Sierra County only had two homicides during years 1994-2003; one in 1999 and one in 2003. If that one homicide in Sierra County in 2003 hadn’t happened, Sierra County would move from the county with the worst rate to tied for the best rate.

Marin County’s mean homicides per year during the years 1994-2003 was 2.7.

When the CA DOJ calculates homicide rates, they exclude counties with populations below 100,000 because they believe the statistics are misleading in that context. See Appendix I.

I happened to notice that the California Dept of Justice’s Firearms Division has placed online a report listing, by county, the number of concealed handgun permits issued during the period 1990-2003. I thought it would be interesting to compare the issue rates by population - so I found some census population estimates by county, and combined the data sets, to get the per capital CHL’s issued in California. Turns out there’s some pretty big variation - between 3.5 percent of the population (Modoc County, for example) to .0013 percent (San Francisco County).

The five counties with the most CHL’s per capita were:

Modoc 3.5893%
Sierra 3.3409%
Trinity 3.1167%
Alpine 2.8950%
Amador 2.2939%

The five counties with the fewest CHL’s per capita were:

San Francisco .0013%
Santa Clara .0112%
Alameda .0139%
Los Angeles .0141%
Santa Cruz .0175%

Here are the county-by-county numbers for 2003, in descending order by ratio of CHL’s to residents. Also, here’s the data as a CSV file if you want to look at it yourself.