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Self-defense 101? A visitor checks a rifle for sale in Chantilly. Gun-rights advocates charge that strict gun control laws can lead to higher violent crime rates than in localities that facilitate gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.
MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
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Anti-gun fanatics can't stand the truth: Self-defense stops crime
Date published: 1/3/2007
BELLEVUE, Wash.--Following a recent FBI report that the first half of 2006 saw an increase in violent crime, anti-gun rights organizations quickly moved to blame passage of concealed carry laws and other common sense reversals of 1990s gun control policies.
There's a term for such a theory: preposterous. Across the country, experts have anticipated this crime increase for some time, because of the rising number of younger males in what researchers call the "crime prone years"--combined with a decrease in the number of jobs for unskilled workers and, perhaps most importantly, a return to the streets of gangsters who were imprisoned in the 1990s, and who have completed their sentences.
Couple that with a deplorable rate of recidivism and a pattern of leniency from judges who ought to know better, and you have the makings of a disaster.
Overworked police--whose ranks have been thinned because many belong to military reserve or National Guard units now deployed overseas--are fighting what amounts to a "holding action" against both new and recycled criminals.
This is hardly the environment in which hysteria-driven crusades for restrictive firearms laws that only affect law-abiding citizens should gain much political traction--except perhaps on editorial pages, in liberal congressional offices, and other bastions of gullibility.
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which should more accurately call itself the "Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership," claimed that during the 1990s, crime fell because the Clinton administration made it "harder for criminals to get guns."
That's not true and he knows it. If gun restrictions are the solution to violent crime, perhaps Helmke can explain why violent crime is skyrocketing in Great Britain, where private gun ownership is highly regulated.
Maybe he can explain why the Australian gun "buy back" has had no measurable effect on homicides there.
Gun laws passed early in the Clinton administration made it more difficult for honest citizens to legally purchase firearms of their choice. Those laws did nothing to keep criminals from getting guns, and a Justice Department survey entitled "Firearm Use by Offenders" (NCJ-189369) proves it.
That study, derived from a survey of prison inmates, revealed that, "During the offense that brought them to prison, 15 percent of state inmates and 13 percent of federal inmates carried a handgun, and about 2 percent, a military-style semiautomatic gun."
Date published: 1/3/2007
Most recent reader comments:
hello...
(posted by
ARN
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
it is unfathomable that the media and the left are perpetuating an agenda that targets ONLY mostly law abiding people who may own a firearm(s)... there are 100's of millions of guns in the u.s. and if you believed the gun control groups and hollywood elites etc... you should actually expect millions upon millions of murders involving hollywood style shootouts... the sky is falling!!!
Live your convictions
(posted by
okimar
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
If the anti-gun folks are so addamant about no guns,lead by example. Live your convictions. Erect a LARGE sign(3'x3')sign in YOUR front yard saying "NO GUNS HERE". Then rely on the cops to show up in a timely fashion. I guarantee you the day WILL come when you wish to God you had a gun, maybe two.
Guns Don't Kill People
(posted by
pndfam05
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
Guns don't kill people. People kill people.
Guns don't protect people. People protect people.
Anti-gun fanatics can't stand the truth: Self-defense stops crime
(posted by
tinman
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
it's about time some real truth was published
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