David Harsanyi is the celebrated author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History With the Gun
“I guess if I were to be fair, I would think about the 1930s when a bunch of crazy people grabbed automatic, fully automatic weapons, and were driving around the countryside robbing banks with Tommy guns and fully automatic rifles. Putting some laws into place that would make it slightly more difficult for those people to have those guns, it might have helped.
“But the reverse seems to be true. I think crime hit a high in the early 1990s. And since that time, over the last 30-35 years, we’ve seen a big drop in crime. And at the same time we’ve seen a big spike in ownership. So I’m not saying that we saw the drop in crime specifically because of the guns, though I think it’s a part of it. But obviously those two things are not related.
“And most times when we see a mass shooting, very tragic events obviously, the laws that the politicians come forward with almost never have anything to do with the event itself. It’s just some other hobby horse, some other law that they’ve been thinking about, that they want to push through. Because, in my estimation, it’s all just leading towards, not confiscation of all guns, but as close as they can get to that.” – David Harsanyi in How the Gun Made America Great