United States – (AmmoLand.com)- Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz recently told a rally that rape soared in Australia after gun confiscation. The anti-gun left jumped into full swing to discredit this candidate’s comments. I read some of the most bizarre and inventive discussions as to why the candidate HAD to be making it up. The Washington Post gave the statement four Pinocchios. Dear Anti-gunners…Not liking a statement does not make it untrue. So below are two tables, once showing the RISE in rapes in Australia from 1997 to 2007. The other shows the drop in rapes in the US. No spin just facts . . .
Rapes in Australia – 1995 to 2007, the source, is the Australian Institute of Criminology:
The following table is of crime in the U.S., including rape and murders, the source if the FBI unified crime report. The rapes are in BLUE:
The simple fact is that Australia had a massive gun confiscation and rapes increased by half or more over the next decade. The US saw a fifty percent drop in rapes while the number of guns owned by American doubled. A woman in Australia is now four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than in the US.
[ED: Here’s a relevant quote from the WaPo Fact Checking article. “All we can really say is that after the buyback, there were increases in sexual assault overall,” said Samara McPhedran, senior research fellow at Griffith University in Australia and chair of the International Coalition of Women in Shooting and Hunting. “However, the available information does not enable us to draw inferences about whether there is any connection between the two events.”]
Twenty-five years ago I had a beer with a retiring Sheriff. He told me that kidnapping a girl was the price of initiation for the local gangs. The younger and prettier the better. No one wants to think about what happened to her in the week or so they held her before her body was found. Strapped for manpower and with a code of silence bottling up any leads, the LEOs put up ads in the local papers, in English and Spanish, announcing they passing out CCWs to women. Classes were announced and Refuse to be a Victim courses were scheduled.
Before a single permit was issued the local gangs stopped the kidnappings. The fear that a woman might have a gun was enough to change the actions of the criminals. So buy a gun, learn how to use it and store it safely, add to your own protections. Our Law Enforcement are the bravest and most selfless men and women we have. But they cannot be everywhere at once.
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About Don McDougall:
Don McDougall is an NRA instructor and member of the Los Padres “Friends of the NRA” committee. If he’s not at the range you will find him setting the record straight with on gun issues and gun safety on AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.