More guns, less crime.

This is a timely news piece from Minnesota. Record low crime rate coincides with record high gun ownership.

Minnesota's violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI.

And in 2017, the state set a new record for firearms background checks.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System reports it processed nearly 683,544 checks on gun buyers in 2017. That includes: 473,975 permits, 94,383 handguns and 125,516 long guns.

Minnesota set another 2017 record, too.

The State Department of Public Safety reports 283,188 Minnesotans now have permits to legally carry firearms in public.

In 2017, the state issued 57,651 permits to carry a weapon in public. That's down from a record 71,156 permits issued in 2016.

Please note that Minnesota is a state that has experienced -massive- immigration from Mexico and also Muslim nations, yet remains largely peaceful.

I lived there a couple years, my impression was that rural people would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it, and they'd give you a bullet just as quick if they thought you needed that. New imports don't mess with the locals much in rural Minnesota. Some mutual respect thing going on there.

I predict, not having done the research myself, that if you looked at a crime map you would find that pretty near all the serious crimes like robbery, murder and rape happened in Minneapolis-St. Paul, in a few very localized pockets. Maybe some in St. Cloud, but not a lot. The state is very discontinuous. There's Minneapolis, run by DemocRats and suffering from all that DemocRat management implies, and then there's the whole rest of the state, where pretty much nothing ever happens.

The Phantom