Friday, May 10, 2013

'Gun violence' plummets, and 'gun control' groups demand course change; but why?


As Seattle Gun Rights Examiner Dave Workman noted yesterday, new findings published by the DoJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics show that violent crime, including "gun crime," has experienced a sustained and dramatic decline between the years of 1993 and 2011 (the time period over which the study was conducted). A Pew Research Center analysis, also just released, came to very similar conclusions. Even the generally reliably anti-gun Los Angeles Times could not help but notice this development:

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The Associated Press notes some raw numbers:

A study released Tuesday by the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that gun-related homicides dropped from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011. That's a 39 percent reduction.

Since the population has been steadily rising over that span, the per capita decrease is even more dramatic.

This, remember, is in the context of soaring gun sales figures over the past several years, with the vast increase very heavily driven by demand for so-called "assault weapons," and handguns designed to accommodate so-called "high capacity" (11 or more rounds) magazines--the very guns we are told are most urgently in need of banning. That means that the "per capita" rate per gun, and especially per "assault weapon," has fallen still more precipitously.

Some of the details of the BJS study are perhaps even more startling, at least to those who have been taken in by the gun prohibitionists' propaganda. The study found, for example, that sales at gun shows account for less than two percent of "crime guns." Enough to make one wonder about the bizarre focus on the mythical "gun show loophole" that so concern the cheerleaders for the defeated Manchin-Toomey private gun sales ban legislation, isn't it?

More at St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner Here

1 comment:

Dick said...

Years ago the NRA estimated 450 million guns and the possibility of over 600 million guns in possession of Americans.