Saturday, January 16, 2010

More Guns, Less Crime

If you have not picked it up from previous posts, I am a big supporter of the Second Amendment. The saying 'when every second counts, the police are just minutes away', rings true. I say this having friends who are police officers and with the utmost respect for the profession. Unless you want an officer on every street corner across the country it can not be any other way. Even then, unless you have an officer follow you around there will still be occasions when you will need to defend yourself. The fear that 'guns cause crime' appears to have been thoroughly debunked, as does the notion that 'economic hardship causes crime'. We have seen a massive surge in gun sales at the same time we have had a massive economic turmoil, and crime rate has dropped precipitously. Guns do not cause crime, but prepare yourself for the next excuse the so called 'gun grabber' will have to, well, grab your guns.

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/opinion/op_ed/article/ED-HINKLE15_20100114-180004/317636 (via)

"despite a remarkable uptick in gun sales, during the first six months of 2009 violent crime fell 4.4 percent, property crime fell 6.6 percent, homicides fell 10 percent, and car thefts fell 19 percent.

As Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute recently pointed out, the falling crime rate was particularly precipitous in big cities such as Los Angeles, where homicides fell 17 percent in 2009, and New York, where they fell 19 percent.

If guns caused crime, then we should have expected precisely the opposite to happen -- particularly given the related liberal belief, which Mac Donald dissects, that hard economic times drive people to desperate acts. Among others, she quotes a New York Times editorial in late 2008 fretting that "the economic crisis has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities." If liberal orthodoxy held true, then the combination of hard times and more guns should have made the past year a record-setting period for bloodshed. It didn't.
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