Revised Minnesota Murder/Manslaughter Rates

The criminal homicide rate for the general population has been added to more accurately compare to the murder plus manslaughter rate for those with a Minnesota carry permit.

Minnesota is one of a few states that track crimes committed by Concealed Carry permit holders.  When the Minnesota law was passed, an annual report of crimes committed by permit holders was required.  The Minnesota permit is simply a permit to carry, the law does not discriminate between carrying concealed and carrying openly.  Reports for the law are available for 2003, and 2005-2012 in pdf files.  

The number of people with Minnesota permits that commit murder or manslaughter is remarkably low.  Only three instances are recorded in the Minnesota Carry Permit annual reports for the nine years reported.

From the reports, the numbers of valid permits for each year are as follows:

2003 - 15,677

2005 - 32,885

2006 - 42,189

2007 - 51,347

2008 - 56,919

2009 - 69,313

2010 - 79,180

2011 - 91,221

2012 - 114,793

Total for the years listed - 553,524

Rate of carry permit holders committing murder and manslaughter/100,000 per year, .542.

Rate of murder in the general population in Minnesota, per 100,000 averaged for the years 2003, 2005 - 2012, is 1.78.

Update: Due to an alert reader, I have found a discrepancy in the comparative figures.  The change is not large, but it is real.    The rates given for the general population are labelled as murder, not murder and manslaughter.   I was able to access official Minnesota crime book pdf files ,  which gives the numbers of criminal homicides, defined there as:

Criminal homicide involves those offenses of murder
and non-negligent homicide that are classified as
willful felonious deaths as distinguished from deaths
caused by negligence. “Attempts to kill” are scored as
aggravated assaults and not as murder. Justifiable or
excusable homicides, suicides, accidental deaths, and
deaths due to negligence are not tabulated in the state
homicide total.

It appears that this number would be equivalent to the aggregate of murders and manslaughters, as it eliminates deaths due to negligence.

Using these numbers and population estimates from this source, plus the population estimate for 2012 from wikipedia, I calculated the rate of criminal homicide for the general population in Minnesota, per 100,000.    Averaged for the years 2003, 2005 - 2012, it is  1.97, which is about 10% higher than the rate for murder alone.

The rate tabulated previously for murder was 1.78.  The rate for criminal homicide has been calculated at 1.97, which should be a fair comparison to the murder plus manslaughter rate shown for Minnesota carry permit holders.


©2013 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
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