Reply #214: Is Dade Co. representative of the entire US?

[Euromutt]

Kudos to the Dade Co. Sheriff's Dept. for maintaining meticulous records, and it certainly provides us with an interesting case study. But while a case study is a useful tool for formulating a hypothesis, it's not much good for testing the general applicability, because we don't know whether Dade County is representative of the United States as a whole, and indeed whether the first five years of CWPs becoming "shall issue" is representative of the current situation.

Let me acknowledge, for the sake of consistency, that we don't know whether the findings of the various studies on DGU frequency conducted in the early to mid-1990s are still applicable, not least because violent crime has dropped by half since 1993. A reduced violent crime rate would presumably also result in fewer attempted violent crimes to defend against, so it's not unreasonable to assume the number of DGUs will no longer be as high.