FBI violent-crime rates show safer nation with more gun owners
Gun-control advocates are noticeably silent when crime rates decline. Their multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts are designed to manufacture mass anxiety that every gun owner is a potential killer. The statistics show otherwise.
Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that violent crime decreased 4 percent in 2011. The number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults all went down, continuing a pattern.
“This is not a one-year anomaly, but a steady decline in the FBI’s violent-crime rates,” said Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association. “It would be disingenuous for anyone to not credit increased self-defense laws to account for this decline.”
Mr. Arulanandam pointed out that only a handful of states had concealed-carry programs 25 years ago, when the violent-crime rate peaked. Today, 41 states either allow carrying without a permit or have “shall issue” laws that make it easy for just about any noncriminal to get a permit. Illinois and Washington, D.C., are the only places that refuse to recognize the right to bear arms. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not respond to requests for comment.
If the gun grabbers were right, we’d be in the middle of a crime wave, considering how many guns are on the streets. “Firearms sales have increased substantially since right after the 2008 election,” said Bill Brassard, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which represents the $4 billion firearms and ammunition industry. “There was a leveling off in 2010, but now we’re seeing a surge again.”
The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) serves as one of the best indicators of gun sales because it counts each time someone buys a gun. Checks hit an all-time high of 16.5 million last year. In the first five months of this year, the numbers have gone up 10 percent over the same period last year as Americans rush to the gun store in case President Obama decides to exercise “more flexibility” in restricting guns in a second term.
Gun manufacturing is the one private-sector industry “doing fine” on Mr. Obama’s watch. Sturm, Ruger & Co. sold 1 million firearms in the first quarter of 2012 – an amazing 50 percent increase from the first quarter of 2011. The jump was so steep that the company stopped accepting orders from March to May to catch up with demand for its products.
The newest thing that home invaders are doing now is yelling “police” as the break into a person’s home so the homeowner doesn’t shoot them.
If they don’t knock first and say police before entering my house they meet Mr. 9mm Carbine rifle. No questions asked.
It is interesting that this trend is emerging in spite of a nearly complete press blackout on news involving citizens successfully defending themselves with firearms. Maybe there’s concerned discussions about armed citizens amongst the ‘hoodies’. But we need something like that to establish causation instead of correlation. Even the NRA complaint of the press blackout offers only one news story.
http://home.nra.org/classic.aspx/blog/321
I’m ambivalent about causation=correlation in the case of gun ownership. However, the statistics seem to look very favorable. I also believe that the 2nd Amendment leaves it up to the citizen and not the government.
You are right about causation!=correlation. This case is a step beyond that, in that there is a clearly understood mechanism as to how it could be the cause.
Sun Tzu wrote 2500 years ago that “all war is based on misdirection.”
It is in exactly this vein that I refuse to mention to anyone how many weapons I have, where I keep them, and whether I’m carrying at any given time.
It is for this reason that every card game in the casino deals at least some cards face down.
So… not demonstrating a causal connection between perceptions of gun ownership and personal safety is clever misdirection? A few TV ads like, ‘Buy S&W, Shoot Responsibly’ could establish what’s apparently missing. Profitably. But they’re not… More clever misdirection?
Not only is this a case in which there is reliable evidence of causation = correlation, but the evidence has been repeatedly detailed. In each and every State which has implemented less restrictive purchase and/or carry laws the decline in violent crime has been documented and immediate. While violent crime had been decreasing prior to the loosening of legal carry laws, the decline has clearly been hastened by the implementation of these laws.
I would also point out that the anti-gunownership crowd’s raison d’etre is their claim is correlation = causation. I.e., they claim that gun ownership causes crime. But we can clearly see that, as gun ownership goes up, crime goes down.
And there are obvious, logical reasons for it.