title:  Texas Lt. Governor Uses Fake Statistics To Defend New Open Carry Law (VIDEO)
text: The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, appeared on Meet The Press with Chuck Todd on Sunday to discuss his state s new open carry law. Now, while we must say Mr. Patrick did a pretty good job at making it seem like he defended the merits of the law, in reality, all he did was provide outdated, heavily debunked statistics.Here s what Dan Patrick had to say about the relation of guns to crime data: Everywhere that we have more citizens carrying guns, crime is less. There s a study showing that where states have open carry, or concealed carry, but particulary open carry, crime is down 25%, murders are down (even). Having law-abiding citizens having guns is a good thing. In fact, Chuck, every one of the mass-shootings except two in America since 1950 have been gun-free zones. Where people have guns, bad guys don t go. Lt. Governor Patrick doesn t cite his source in the interview, but given how he just said open carry causes crime to go down 25%, we re going to assume he s referring to Florida State Rep. Matt Gaetz s (R-Fort Walton Beach) research. Matt Gaetz is the guy who came up with all this from when he sponsored a bill in October to allow open carry in his state.During a press conference, he claimed to show research that proved violent crime was  23 percent lower in states that allowed open carry, and the murder rate was 5 percent lower.  There are just a few problems with this. Politifact decided to fact-check this and determined that it was very misleading. For one, Gaetz only used data for one full year (not very historical by any means) and compiled it in such a manner that would make it impossible to draw a reasonable conclusion from. It noted that no policy makers should rely on it. Yes, anyone can come up with stats, but that doesn t make them applicable. If a policy maker were to try then and use these stats to make the claim that this proves open carry laws make people safer, then that deserves the title of fake.Florida State University criminology professor Gary Kleck doesn t think you can use just one statistic to back up a claim when several other studies are proving otherwise. Plenty of research has found rates of carry permit holding having no net effect on crime rates, including violent crime rates, one way or the other. And, not only that but the opposite appears to be true. The Washington Post published an article entitled: More gun, more crime: New research debunks central thesis of the gun rights movement. In it, it points out how Stanford law professor John Donohue has advanced decades of analysis showing that guns do in fact equal more crime. So much for the Texas Lt. Governor s argument that we need more guns to be safe. I guess this is what you get when you pick and choose your facts, heavily debunked ones at that.Featured image via screen capture.