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WINSTON-SALEM — Opinions are sharply divided over the question of allowing people with concealed-carry permits to take their guns into county parks.

That's true on the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners and among experts who have combed the data to find whether concealed-carry laws make people safer, have no effect or increase risk.

Commissioner Bill Whiteheart, who advocates changing county ordinances to allow concealed-carry guns in parks, said during a board discussion Thursday that an armed resident can make a difference when "seconds matter and the police are moments away."

But Commissioner Everette Witherspoon called the proposal "a recipe for disaster" and a financial risk as well because of the county's investment in Tanglewood Park in Clemmons.

"If people don't feel safe to come out to Tanglewood, it will have an effect on revenue," Witherspoon said.

Under the county's current ordinance, no weapons are allowed in county parks. Last year, the N.C. General Assembly revised the state's gun laws to bring about more uniformity in gun regulations around the state. The exception was that cities, counties and other units of local government could, by ordinance, ban concealed-carry guns from government buildings and recreational parks equipped with playgrounds, ball fields and the like.

Winston-Salem responded to the new legislation by passing regulations that forbid concealed-carry weapons in city parks.

County administrators initially recommended to the board of commissioners that the county pass an ordinance that would continue the policy of keeping weapons from parks.

But Whiteheart said that having responsible people around with guns could be good if a crime were being committed.

Commissioner Walter Marshall, who is black, said that he fears that black people wearing hooded jackets or baggy pants could be in danger if an armed white person perceived them as posing a threat.

Marshall said that he has been threatened in the past and that he keeps a gun for self-defense. He's not bothered by the idea of a responsible person carrying a gun, he said, but people with permits have been known to commit violent acts.

If commissioners are divided, so are researchers. John Lott, an academic and the author of "More Guns, Less Crime," says the data show that violent crime has gone down in the wake of the passage of concealed-carry legislation.

"When those first right-to-carry laws were passed, people were predicting bloodshed in the street," Lott said recently. "That didn't happen. If they (officials) point to some problem they think is going to happen in the parks, they are going to have to explain why it didn't happen in any other jurisdiction."

But John J. Donohue III, an academic researcher who has weighed in on the other side of the question, said Lott looked at the data and "got it wrong." Donohue's own work asserts that concealed-carry laws have resulted in no decrease in crime and that the data shows concealed-carry laws are associated with higher crime rates.

"In general, I suspect we would do better if we had less access to guns in this country," Donohue said. "But it seems like the political thrust is moving in the opposite direction. When you have as many guns as we've got, it is hard to see how we can stem the tide in any way. This is the most gun-saturated place on earth."

Donohue concedes this much: letting concealed weapons into a park "is such a small tweak" on the issue that it is hard to pin down what the result might be.

The U.S. National Academies, which looked over all the studies in a 2004 report, concluded that the reported effect of concealed-carry laws on crime can vary a lot depending on what kinds of models the researchers use to massage their data. They concluded that there's no evidence that concealed-carry laws cause a crime-rate reduction.

Another question that remained unanswered during last week's discussion was how to regulate concealed weapons at events where wine or beer is being served. County Manager Dudley Watts said the county would research whether the state law deals with that and report to commissioners this Thursday.

Commissioner Debra Conrad said that an ordinance prohibiting guns wouldn't stop criminals from carrying them.

"You can have all the ordinances in the world," she said. "The bad people are going to do what they are going to do."