I enjoyed this article very much.  I moved to San Francisco from Houston about a year ago and couldn't help but notice the irony associated with SFO banning gun ownership inside the city limits, during the same election cycle that the state of my former residence banned gay marriage. 

 

One thought (based on your article), that had never occurred to me was to conduct a retroactive micro analysis of violent crimes to determine; A) If it could reasonably be concluded, based on the manner in which a crime was committed, whether gun laws would have made difference in the commission of the crime (such as what you did with the MA crime), and; B) The impact of a localities gun possession laws on crime to determine if the crime could possibly been prevented with a relaxation of gun possession crimes.  My only concern with your analysis of the CA postal deal was that when a crime takes place as quickly as many do, there's little chance to end the crime with someone pulling out a gun and shooting the criminal actor.  I admit not being that familiar with that case, but this is what I've concluded based on similar "postal" style crimes.

 

Now for my own experience:  For a short while I was a security director for a convenience store chain, during the time in which Texas passed the concealed handgun carry law.  Interestingly, the company I worked for was huge and owned c-stores in almost all the states.  One thing I noticed that was unassailable in terms of the statistics I tracked, was that within days of TX passing the law I noticed a decreased in armed robberies in TX, which I suppose to those of our ilk could have been expected, but what I had not anticipated was that the robberies of stores in adjacent states (such as NM as one that immediately came to mind) increased quite noticably.  And, the closer the stores were to the TX borders, the lower the TX stores armed robbery stats decreased, and, conversely, the higher the other stores armed robber stats went.  This so obviously a displacement of armed robbery to me was remarkable, yet no gun-freedom advocates publicly spoke about, nor of which gun-control advocates cared.

 

Mark Vorzimmer