DEBUNKING THE MYTHS: Gun Violence Is NOT As Bad As Liberals Would Have You Believe

DEBUNKING THE MYTHS: Gun Violence Is NOT As Bad As Liberals Would Have You Believe

March 7, 2013

In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, Americans were treated to the usual round of breast-beating decrying what an incredibly violent country we are.  The solution according to Democrats and the media?  Gun control.  The only problem with this is that hard numbers show that, as ordinary, law-abiding Americans have become more heavily armed, America has become a safer, not a more dangerous country.

In a March 3 story, the Washington Post reported that gun deaths and violent crimes are both down in America:

Back in the crack-infused 1980s, young men with guns and drugs ruled the single block of Hanover Place NW. People who lived in the two-story rowhouses one mile north of the Capitol fell asleep year round to the sounds of the Fourth of July, a pop-pop-pop that they hoped was firecrackers. It rarely was.
But after two decades of consistent and dramatic declines in homicides and gun violence in Washington and many other major cities, Hanover Place is mostly quiet these days. Complaints to the police tend to be more about kids shooting craps on the sidewalk than about drug dealers shooting at rival street crews. On a block where houses were unloaded for as little as $30,000 in the 1990s, the most recent sales have ranged from $278,000 to $425,000.

The post even has a really cool chart it made based upon FBI statistics.  The abrupt drop in violent crime is staggering:

Marc Fisher, who wrote the above words, is delighted that violent crime is declining, but cannot, for the life of him, understand why this is so.  In the same article, he tosses out a variety of possible reasons:

As welcome as such changes have been, explanations for the nation’s plummeting homicide rate remain elusive, stymieing economists, criminologists, police, politicians and demographers. Have new police strategies made a difference, or have demographic shifts and population migrations steered the change? Could the reasons be as simple as putting more bad guys behind bars, or does credit go to changes made a generation ago, such as taking the lead out of gasoline or legalizing abortion?

 

All of those reasons could be correct.  But there’s another possible reason for the decrease in violent crime between 1992 and 2011.  An equally nice chart shows a nice correlation between the decrease in gun crime and the fact that more and more states allowed responsible citizens to get concealed carry licenses.  Rob Vance, who blogs at No Lawyers — Only Guns and Money, generated a chart that’s just as nice as the Washington Post’s chart.  The only difference is that, instead of showing only the FBI’s decreased crime numbers, it also includes data about increases in concealed carry:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that decreases in crime and increases in armed citizens might be related.  Rather than ruminating ponderously about impossible-to-prove theories such as decreased led in gasoline or increased abortion, Marc Fisher might have had an easier time of it if he stuck to the numbers.
Here are some more interesting numbers that address Fisher’s point about the stunning decrease in crime in Washington, D.C., which was once one of America’s most violent cities. The one thing that has been remarkably consistent when governments ban private citizens from carrying arms is that the violent crime rate increases.  England experienced a drastic increase in its violent crime rate when it imposed stringent gun bans.  One needn’t go so far from home, though.  Both Washington, D.C. and Chicago, which enacted the strictest gun control laws in America, saw their violent crime rates skyrocket.
Beleaguered Washington, D.C. residents eventually filed suit, alleging that the gun control laws violated their constitutional right to bear arms.  The Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller agreed, striking down the gun control laws.  Gun control proponents then predicted that Washington, D.C.’s already high crime rate would reach apocalyptic heights.  As John Lott explained back in March 2010 in a Fox news opinion piece, these predictions were far off the mark:

But Armageddon never arrived. Quite the contrary, murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that is now down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, Washington’s lowest since 1967. While other cities have also fared well over the last year, D.C.’s drop was several times greater than that for other similar sized cities. According to preliminary estimates by the FBI, nationwide murders fell by a relatively more modest 10 percent last year and by about 8 percent in other similarly sized cities of half a million to one million people (D.C.’s population count is at about 590,000).

The Washington Post argues that America is a safer place in recent years in spite of guns.  This conclusion is almost certainly bass ackwards.  The reality is that America is a safer place in recent years because of guns.  It’s certainly true that the other factors Marc Fisher included in his article — demographic shifts, stricter prison terms, lead-free gasoline, and abortion — may all affect the violent crime decline but, as Fisher acknowledges, it’s almost impossible to prove a strong correlation for any of these.  The one factor that correlates strongly and effortlessly with decreased crime, however, is concealed carry.
All of us, wherever we sit on America’s political spectrum, are grateful when are nation is a safer place.  Those of us who believe in the Second Amendment, however, can only be deeply frustrated when Progressives acknowledge this change, but then work as aggressively as possibly to reverse the single trend — rising concealed carry rates — that most closely correlates with this drop in crime.  One wishes that Progressives would understand that, if you hear hoof beats outside your window, don’t go looking for zebras that you’re not likely to find; look for plain old horses instead.