In Missouri, Fewer Gun Restrictions and More Gun Killings

[SecularMotion]

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jean Peters Baker, the county prosecutor here, stood at her desk poring over Facebook photographs of young men posing with guns. One wore a grinning mask and pointed his gun at the camera. Another clasped guns in each hand. A third was laughing uproariously, his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle.

“This is our reality,” Ms. Peters Baker said, gesturing toward the pictures from recent investigations. “I’m not talking about my uncle who still lives on a farm in central Missouri and uses a gun for hunting.”

In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.

But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19. What has followed may help answer a central question of the gun control debate: Does allowing people to more easily obtain guns make society safer or more dangerous?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/22/health/in-missouri-fewer-gun-restrictions-and-more-gun-killings.html