“Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly “free” state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.” Tiffany Madison
Mass shootings are never far from the headlines. People want solutions but nobody seems to have any that actually work.
According to Numbeo’s recently updated 2023 Crime Index, a dozen cities in the U.S. ranked among the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world. Those cities included Baltimore, Memphis, Detroit, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Oakland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Houston.
The worst 31 counties in the U.S., generally urban jurisdictions with around one-fifth of the country’s population, account for 42% of all homicides, with the worst 5% accounting for 73%, according to a study by the Crime Prevention Research Center, using FBI data for 2020.
Judging from the statistics, homicides aren’t a nationwide problem – it’s a problem in concentrated areas within America’s biggest cities and counties, the majority of which are controlled by Democrats with some of the most stringent gun control laws on the books. So, rather than this constant barrage against guns and legal gun owners, perhaps we need to look at what’s unique about the inner cities and what we can do to minimize the damage.
Mass shooting cause less than 1% of all gun deaths, and individuals who engaged in mass shootings used handguns 77.2% of the time and rifles only 25.1%, according to data from the National Institute of Justice.
Most individuals who perpetrated mass shootings had a prior criminal record and a history of violence, including domestic violence. Most died on the scene of the public mass shooting, with 38.4% dying by their own hand and 20.3% killed by law enforcement officers.
Guns aren’t the issue. The people who commit these sick, twisted crimes are. The most ironic part of the gun control debate is that most of the time and energy spent arguing over whether people should be permitted to keep their God-given right to defend themselves and their families focuses almost exclusively on instances in which people are murdered by criminals and almost never on those much-more-common occasions when law-abiding citizens stop murderers or are the victims of gun violence perpetrated by people who don’t possess guns legally.
A study published by Harvard in 2013 by Don B. Kate’s, an American criminologist and constitutional lawyer, and Gary Mauser, a Canadian criminologist and university professor took a look at firearm ownership, gun laws and violent crime, and suicide rates around the world. The authors sought to answer the question would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? Their conclusion is that “where firearms are most dense, violent crime rates are lowest and where guns are least dense violent crimes rates are highest.”
In other words, normal, ordinary, law-abiding people don’t murder other people. Homicide is more likely motivated by socio-economic and cultural factors and marked by an extensive history of violence.
In addition to the Harvard study, at least two other studies reported similar conclusions. In 2003 the US CDC and in 2004 the US National Academy of Sciences both concluded that they “failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicides, or gun accidents.”
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Firearms are a tool, and they can be used for good or evil. Legal firearms owners do not pose a public threat to safety. In fact, they save countless lives every year. Depriving people of their means of self-defense does nothing to protect them.
Evil people use guns to commit crimes. And it is foolish to think that banning guns will magically make them into respectable citizens.
All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party. Mao Tse Tung
Source: Bad neighborhoods: 1% of counties responsible for 42% of America’s murders by Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times; Guns Don’t Kill People, But Gun Bans Do by Justin Haskins, the Federalist; Harvard Study: No Correlation Between Gun Control and Less Violent Crime by Awr Hawkins, Breitbart; Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International Evidence, Papers.ssrn.com
