UN knotted gun SCULPTURE
(AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

By Rob Morse

Gun Prohibitionists call for more gun control every time a criminal uses a firearm. Like a bunch of short attention span headline surfers, we pass more gun control laws every year without bothering to ask if they actually work. When you stand back and look, however, you can’t help but notice that the places with the strictest gun control laws include some of our most violent cities.

Are gun control laws making us safer, or are they putting us in greater danger?

We know a lot about the honest people who own guns. There are between 80 and 100 million gun owners in the US today. Between 40 to 50 percent of us live in a household with a gun, though one report said that number may actually be as high as 60 percent.

We know that gun owners defend themselves about 1.6 million times a year, and people who have access to a legally-owned firearm defend themselves as many as 2.8 million times a year. That is over 7,600 times a day. In other words, Americans protecting themselves and making our families safer is a regular, normal part of life.

We know a lot about individual gun owners, too. We know the identity of the particular individuals who applied for a license to carry a firearm in public. They obviously own a gun. About one in twelve adults legally carry a firearm in public. Because we know who they are and can track their history, we know that these concealed carriers are safer with their guns, less violent, and more law-abiding than even the police.

For the vast majority of us, firearms are used to prevent violent crime rather than to cause it. What does that say then about efforts to make guns harder and more expensive to get?

We also know a lot about criminals. Most violent criminals didn’t use a firearm in the commission of their crimes. Said another way, if we somehow disarmed all the criminals in this country, about 90 percent of violent crimes would continue unchanged since most of those criminals didn’t use guns in the first place.

Though informative, though, all fo that leaves out some vital information.

Most criminals don’t use a gun, but many honest citizens do use a firearm to stop crimes such as robberies, burglaries, assaults, rapes and murders. Also, many of the most violent crimes were committed by criminals with a firearm. If that was illegal — and it is — why didn’t our laws stop them?

The good news is that despite the best efforts of many politicians and “progressive” prosecutors, violent crime is relatively rare in this country. Murder is localized and extremely rare. Most counties won’t have a murder of any kind in a typical year, let alone one that involves a firearm.

Most of our murders happen in failed longtime Democrat-controlled cities. In those areas, most of the murders are committed by drug gangs. And in those drug gangs, most murders are committed by a few individual criminals. Two percent of our counties account for over half of the murders in America and most of those happen in just a few a few zip codes.

Those facts reveal some uncomfortable truths.

Most areas are relatively crime-free and it isn’t because of a law. It’s because of moms and a dads who are sober. It’s due to people with jobs and a future. It isn’t that you and I — average Americans — couldn’t kill, it’s that we choose not to. You couldn’t make us hurt an innocent person.

It isn’t laws on paper that keep us from committing murder, it’s the laws that were written onto our hearts while we were sitting around the dinner table. 

The truth is that we have more violent crime in our failed cities because of bad political decisions. Politicians need to appear relevant so they pass more laws. Those laws don’t even have to work beyond creating a media event and publicity for those who create them.

Ink on paper isn’t what stops you and me from killing, and ink on paper doesn’t stop the violent enforcers in drug gangs either. In fact, disarming honest people only makes it simpler for criminals to find easy victims. If gun control stopped violent crime then big blue cities would be law-abiding utopias.

Millions of honest citizens who live in blue states recently learned how hard it is to buy a firearm legally when they want one. Getting a gun to carry legally can take months while criminals can get their hand on guns in minutes on the street. Gun control laws don’t change criminal behavior. They never have. Gun control only makes it harder for honest people to defend themselves and their families

Criminals get their guns the same place they get their drugs…on the street.

The way I see it, gun control laws serve only one purpose. Politicians need gun control laws to mask their failures. They hold them up to show they’ve actually done something…no matter how ineffectual what they “done” actually is. No wonder we have thousands of gun regulations already on the books…and the list is growing every day.

 

Rob Morse blogs at Slow Facts. This article originally appeared there and is reprinted here with permission. 

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22 COMMENTS

  1. They never did add up. Fascism wants unarmed victims. And they will do anything to get them. Corporate billionaires are behind the modern gun control push. Wealthy old white men that want to bring back notzee-ism in a big way.

    • How do you think dacian and miner will implement their “final solution” to gun violence? They believe to eliminate gun violence, you eliminate gun owners. Along with the loot and property for “redistribution”. And finally they will add the environmental benefit of reduced consumption.

    • jwm,

      Well, that’s HALF the story. Our beneficent gummint definitely wants unarmed victims, but more importantly, they want unarmed SUBJECTS. The government (rightly) fears an armed populace. Harder for Senile Joe’s handlers to control (Senile Joe can’t even control his own bladder). They don’t, frankly, give a shart whether we kill each other, or not – they don’t want us killing THEM, or their jackbooted thugs (Dettelbach, Wray, Garland, Bonta, I’m looking at YOU). They are determined to pursue this course. We tolerate this at our own peril.

      “Gun control” is never (and was never) about guns; it’s about CONTROL. Molon labe is the only sensible answer.

  2. Rocky Mountain High.
    Cant vote for who you’d like to vote for, nope not here.
    Castro’s seal of approval.

  4. “Your rights end where my feelings begin.”

    Now, yer gittin’ it. “Welcome to the fusion of enlightenment and entertainment!”

    Thirsty are you? Take a swig of righteous Kool-Aid, fresh made, and an inexhaustible supply.

  5. Sure, gun control works. Just as well as the prohibition of the sales, manufacture or transportation of alcohol worked. Or the war on drugs.
    No law ever written has, nor ever will, prevent a crime.
    Murder has been illegal for a very long time. Has that fact ever stopped anyone from committing murder?
    The 2 things that prevent crimes are the teaching of moral behavior, and the sure knowledge the potential victim can and has the means and will to fight back.

    • To add, the surety of swift retribution from the community. We know the difference between right and wrong, and punishing those who treat others “wrong” must be certain.

  6. Good God, how many times does this need to be said …

    DEMOCRATS DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT VIOLENCE.

    They just use it as an excuse to disarm us so they can steal our property, and, ultimately, murder us. Start using THAT argument against the gun grabbers and see how they react.

    • I think the only argument gunm grabbers listen to is a 2×4 upside the head.
      Besides that they pretty much turn a deaf ear to arguments that are constitutionally protected

  9. The only purpose of gun control is to make it harder for law abiding persons to be armed.

    People WITH guns make the worst slaves.

    • Craig – here’s my ‘suggestion’ for their slogan: “a disarmed population is a controllable population”. We know that is their ultimate goal but they won’t use such a slogan since it is too blatantly obvious as to their real end game.

  10. Gun control has nothing to do whatsoever with safety. Simply put power and control. Nothing more and nothing less.

  11. This fine article and it’s author should be showcased on the Sunday morning news and opinion circuit. The uninformed public needs to hear this side of the coin.

  12. When I saw the news of the Prague shooting, I thought “there goes the Left’s claim that those attacks only happen in America.” I don’t get briefings lately, but I know that for every shooting or little war anywhere in the world that we see on the news, there are 10 more we never hear about. And I’ve avoided countless violent attacks in my lifetime just because the bad guys saw or suspected that I was armed. I could also show you dozens of places in the world that are more dangerous than here, places where only the authorities are supposed to be armed. In some of those places, it’s their police that are the greatest threat. It’s ultimately our basic right to self-defense that the radical left want to take away.

    • One of those places you alluded to is just south of our own border, and our dementia- riddled Grampa Joe not only leaves the front door open, he has the welcome mat stuck in it so it can’t be closed easily.

  13. Politicians with laws never stop bad guys with guns, evil intent.
    They only control the goods guys, which is their true intent.

    The late Col Jeff Cooper commented in 1958, “Killing is a matter of will, not means. You cannot control the intent by passing laws about the means.”

    “One of the notable aspects of the democratic process is that one need not know anything about a subject in order to pass laws about it.” – ole Jeffy again.

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