Kopel: Are people with Right-to-Carry permits a menace to society?

In any large population (e.g., 240,000) there will be at least a small percentage who over a period of time are found guilty of some crimes. This does not mean that that population as a whole is dangerous. It would have been useful to compare the conviction rates of North Carolinians who have carry licenses with the convictions rates of those who do not. I suspect that the non licensee crime rate would be much higher, especially for violent gun crimes.
In a 2009 article in the Connecticut Law Review, I collected data from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. (The state data begin on page 564 of the article.) The data show that concealed carry licensees are much more law abiding than the general population, and that the rate of gun misuse of any sort (let alone having something to do with violence in public place) is less than one in one thousand.