Gun Control lobbying in the face of the VT tragedy
I fully expect the press, in an attempt to put the 2nd Amendment on trial for the insane spectacle brought on Virginia Tech yesterday. Sure they’ll talk about the shooter, but I fully expect them to uncover an underlying excuse for his behavior, and pass this off as further proof that we need stiffer gun controls in this country, regardless of what our rights as citizens may be.
There are numerous arguments both for and against the control of guns and there ARE extremists on both sides of the issue.
We had a 23 year old man armed with a handgun and a load of ammunition who went on a psychotic tear yesterday and murdered 32 people in cold blood.
My comment on all of this isn’t “arm the students to the teeth and let them partake in a shootout”, it is this. If ONE person in the first building had been in possesion of a gun, then at the very least, 1 person would have died yesterday.
Open up a search engine… there HAVE been instances where school gun violence have been stopped… NOT by police force, but by a civilian with the training needed to save lives.
“But gun control prevents crimes!” – FALSE
Washington D.C. imposed a ban on ALL gun sales in 1977… by 1990, the murder rate for the city had tripled. (Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia)
The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 imposed unprecedented restrictions relating to firearms nationwide. Yet, compared to the five years before the law, the national murder rate averaged 50% higher during the five years after the law, 75% higher during the next five years, and 81% higher during the five years after that.
Gun control is meant to be in place to deal with criminals, yet the statistics related to it show that the people that such laws affect the most are law abiding citizens.
Someone that has no regard for the law, will obtain a weapon wether it’s illegal or not. By banning guns, you’re simply removing them from the hands of the upstanding citizens… not the criminals.
“But letting people carry guns in public is just going to lead to more violence!” – FALSE
If you allow citizens to legally carry a concealed weapon a would be criminal has no way of knowing which possible victim is armed and willing to defend themselves. If you knowingly remove the citizens right to protect himself, then you have removed doubt from the mind of the criminal and emboldened their pursuit of a victim because they KNOW that there is no chance of running across armed resistence.
Prof. John R. Lott, Jr. (More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) showed through extencive research (data ranging from gun ownership polls to FBI crime rate data for each of the nation’s 3,045 counties over an 18-year period. As well as statistics on income, poverty, unemployment, population density, arrest rates, conviction rates and length of prison sentences.) that in regions of the country with increased private gun ownership, their violent crime rates decreased the most. The most dramatic statistics were in high-crime urban areas that showed the largest decrease in violent crimes where private citizens were allowed to carry a concealed handgun.
Lott writes that “a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate–as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3%, rape by 2% and robberies by over 2%.”
“Murder rates decline when either more women or more men carry concealed handguns, but the effect is especially pronounced for women. An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men.”
This is pure numbers talking here, not political pressure or rhetoric.
