By Rob Morse
Suppose a criminal commits a crime a gun. Go a step further and suppose he does something truly awful and shoots several people in the process. If you’re an anti-gun politician, the obvious conclusion is it’s now time to disarm your gun-owning neighbors.
Do elected anti-gun zealots care that implementing their bigoted disarmament fantasies not only infringe on human rights, but also leave us with even more dead victims? I doubt it, since what’s out of sight is usually also out of mind.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the killers who sit in city hall are never arrested or even charged…until now.
The media is intrinsically biased about the stories it chooses to publish. We’re bombarded with sensational news of violence as the crumbling corporate media struggle to sell advertising and generate clicks. Those who still watch see evidence of it every night in the stories that are clearly designed to sell shock and outrage.
Add healthy dose of ignorance to that corporate bias and we get to the point where the talking heads label any black rifle as an “automatic AR” and every handgun is a GLOCK. The toxic blend of that bias and ignorance help explain why we’re so seldom told about honest citizens using a firearm to defend themselves. Gun control politicians also depend on our ignorance.
Armed self defense, however, is common. Honest citizens use guns to defend themselves about 2.8 million times a year. Of those, rifles are used about 370,000 times. In contrast, FBI statistics show that violent criminals use rifles less than once a day, 364 times in 2019.
That kind of perspective is critically important, but in short supply. We defend ourselves using a rifle over a thousand times more than criminals use them to commit crimes. Even if we include every firearm used in a crime that couldn’t be identified, the criminal use of rifles is at most one percent of the instances they’re used in self-defense.
Disarming honest citizens only makes the criminals’ jobs easier. Since criminals don’t obey the law, it’s questionable whether gun-control disarms any of them at all. Note that we don’t see crime rates fall when states and cities pass gun control laws. The bitter truth is that we can’t solve a small problem by creating a bigger one, yet politicians try to do exactly that, time after time.
Democrats on the Indianapolis city council passed an ordinance banning honest people from carrying concealed handguns this week, even if they have their state license to carry and have passed the FBI criminal background check. They also banned so-called, “assault weapons.” Both measures are illegal and unenforceable as they violate Indiana’s preemption law.
Earlier this year, Democrat-controlled Los Angeles banned licensed concealed carry on county property like public parks, beaches and walkways. The Democrat-controlled state of Washington State banned “assault weapons.”
A recent report from the Evergreen State showed that gun control laws like those have failed to reduce crime. In fact, crime went up when Democrat politicians disarmed honest citizens. Yet the response from politicians to this is to enact still more restrictions on people’s gun rights.
It doesn’t matter if gun control actually works. It only matters that gun control laws produce a good press releases and a prime time interview.
Money talks, and gun control laws are designed to deliver campaign contributions from the base. Since reporters don’t know or care how often ordinary citizens defend themselves using guns, they never point out the obvious contradictions and we’re supposed to ignore the dead bodies these laws leave in their wake. Yet anti-gun politicians advocate for and enact them time and time again.
Disarming law-abiding good guys may play well with the media and rack up campaign contributions, but its gets more people killed. People who can’t afford or don’t have time to comply with the restrictions. We get more robberies, more assaults, more rapes, and more murders when innocent victims were disarmed. Thousands more. Those aren’t just statistics when it’s your family that’s been disarmed and victimized.
Some of those criminals will be caught. If they’re prosecuted, some will be convicted. A few may even do jail time. Unfortunately, unlike some of the criminals with guns, the killers in city hall will never face the consequences for their actions.
This article originally appeared at Slow Facts Blog and is reprinted here with permission.