Gun control advocates have to lie if they hope to make a convincing argument that guns cause violence. That is because the facts don’t match their desire to remove weapons from the hands of private citizens. Private citizens who own guns, by and large, are also responsible citizens. It is hard to sell a message that individuals cannot be trusted with guns when the data proves otherwise.
Why do the states with the most liberal and least restrictive gun laws also have the least violent crime, statistically speaking? Why do the big cities with the most restrictive gun laws also have the most gun violence per capita? Maybe it is because government is exacerbating the social problems that lead to high rates of violence. Rather than fixing crime rates, gun restrictions just increase the crime rates.
In the mean time, the fear mongers that comprise the anti-gun crowd continue to make up stuff to convince the rest of us that they should control your right to defend yourself from the criminal class they helped create.
The VPC (Violence Policy Center) also has to purposely limit its selectively picked data to states rather than cities. This is because the one jurisdiction with the strictest gun control in the entire nation is the District of Columbia. In D.C., all handguns are banned, long arms must be stored disassembled, locked and unloaded, and law-abiding citizens have no right to carry guns. According to the same 2005 CDC data relied upon by the VPC, D.C. has the highest rate of shooting deaths of any place in the United States! The district has well over double the national average.
Gun crimes happen because of groups like the Violence Policy Center. These groups try to teach us that we as individuals are not responsible enough to decide for ourselves the course of our lives. When you pursue policies that discourage self-reliance you foster an atmosphere of apathy, under achievement, hopelessness and despair. If the Violence Policy Center and other groups like it truly want to change the levels of violence in our cities, they should focus on improving education and changing the cultural values we teach the children who live in those violent zip codes. You cannot solve a problem if you are not willing to look at the root causes of the problem. Violence is not caused by guns, it is caused by flawed memes.
The memes children learn in New Hampshire are very different from the memes children learn in Washington, D.C.
Gun control certainly works.
London also emerges as the “crime capital of Europe” with the likelihood of becoming a victim – mostly of a range of petty crimes – said to be higher than all other EU capitals and even higher than cities such as Istanbul and New York.
It works in favor of criminals. Ask the British.