For the third consecutive year, violent crime has declined in the United States during the same period when gun and ammunition purchases have increased dramatically, something that should not be happening, if one were to believe the gun prohibition lobby.
The FBI on Monday released preliminary uniform crime data showing that the four major violent crime categories are all slipping. Overall, 2009 experienced a 7.2 percent drop in murders, an 8.1 percent decrease in robbery, a 4.2 percent decline in aggravated assault and 3.1 percent reduction in forcible rape.
Yet, according to data from the FBI’s National Instant Check System and – from all places – the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, gun and ammunition sales are up dramatically. NICS background checks are up this year, and the excise tax apportionments to the states from the sale of firearms and ammunition have climbed from $336,474,545 in Fiscal Year 2009 to a whopping $472,719,710 for FY 2010. Do any kind of math you like, that still translates to more than $136 million in additional excise tax revenues over 2009, which further translates to a lot more guns and ammunition, and hunting/shooting-related gear changing hands at the retail counter.
Preliminary data indicates that, for the third year in a row, the rate of violent crime in the United States is down. It appears that property crime also declined, for the seventh straight year.
These excise taxes are levied under the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act, passed in the early 1930s at the insistence of American hunters. They saw this program as a means to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for wildlife enhancement, habitat acquisition and maintenance, range development and hunter education. But the figure is also a pretty good gauge of how many guns and how much ammunition Americans are buying. (The FY 2008 apportionment under Pittman-Robertson was $309,686,579 and for FY 2007, the states split $266,592,809.)
Meanwhile, some estimates place the number of concealed carry permits and licenses across the country at more than 6 million. Again, in this kind of environment – if one had been listening to groups like Washington CeaseFire and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence – with all of those guns and all of those armed citizens, neighborhoods should be flooded with blood.
Adding to the embarrassment of gun prohibition groups (if they aren’t embarrassed, they ought to be!) is the revelation from the National Shooting Sports Foundation that 8.9 million Americans went target shooting last year with AR-style rifles. The NSSF survey found that owners of “modern sporting rifles,” which anti-gunners deliberately and falsely portray as “assault weapons,” are the most active recreational shooters in the country. Check these facts about sport-utility rifles.
The first comprehensive survey to look at ownership and use of modern sporting rifles reveals that 8.9 million Americans went target shooting with AR-style rifles in 2009 and that participants using this type of rifle were the most active among all types of sport shooters.—National Shooting Sports Foundation
This cannot be good news for the people who recently brought to Seattle one Dennis Henigan from the Brady Campaign. This column discussed his visit here, and it appears from reading an account posted on the Open Carry/Washington forum that at least one gun rights activist challenged him on some of his positions.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said all of this information translates to “one irrefutable fact.”
“There are more guns in private hands than ever before,” he said, “yet crime rates have declined. In plain English, this means that gun prohibitionists have been consistently wrong. Higher rates of gun ownership have not resulted in more bloodshed, as the gun ban lobby has repeatedly forecast with its ‘sky-is-falling’ rhetoric.”
Privately, Gottlieb is waiting to see how the gun ban lobby tries to spin this new FBI data.
For many years anti-gunners made all kinds of wild predictions that higher rates of gun ownership and the expansion of shall-issue carry permits would leave neighborhoods awash in blood. The data proves otherwise.should turn its back on the gun prohibition lobby and their insidious policy of victim disarmament.”—Alan Gottlieb America
Perhaps instead of spinning the story to suit their agenda, which appears to be losing more relevancy by the day, gun prohibitionists will instead leap off the proverbial deep end, as did one of their stalwarts last week, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Dreading what appears to be an almost certain nullification of his city’s handgun ban by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the Second Amendment, Daley simply rails on about how the ban has worked, even if his city continues to be one of the murder and mayhem hot spots of the nation.
It’s (’s handgun ban) been very effective. If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective it is. Let me put a round up your, you know."—Mayor Richard Daley Chicago
On camera during a press conference, Daley vulgarly suggested that he should poke a rifle up the backside of some reporter and pull the trigger. If an average gun owner had done something like that, he might easily be facing criminal charges, and the media would be in a feeding frenzy trying to portray him as representative of all gun owners. In Daley’s case, the press outside of Chicago has essentially ignored the story. Far be it from MSNBC to suggest Daley epitomizes the average gun control proponent.
Instead of criticizing Daley, gun owners should thank him. His antics merely help solidify the resolve within the firearms community that his kind of hysteria never becomes the law of the land. They help the general public recognize what gun owners have faced for decades, and people are gradually beginning to understand the extremism that has guided the anti-gun movement for years.
It may not be the “gun lobby” that ultimately puts an end to the gun prohibitionist movement. Instead, it will likely be facts as presented by the FBI, and the clownish behavior of Mayor Daley and people like him that crashes the gun ban movement on the rocks.
More from Gun Rights Examiners
Atlanta: Ed Stone | Austin: Howard Nemerov | Boston: Ron Bokleman | Charlotte: Paul Valone | Cheyenne: Anthony Bouchard | Chicago: Don Gwinn | Cleveland: Daniel White | DC: Mike Stollenwerk | Denver: Dan Bidstrup | Detroit: Rob Reed | Fort Smith: Steve D. Jones | Knoxville: Liston Matthews | Los Angeles: John Longenecker | Minneapolis: John Pierce | National: David Codrea | Seattle: Dave Workman | St. Louis: Kurt Hofmann | Tucson: Chris Woodard
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Comments
HAHAHAHAHA
Keep it up, Dave! These statist SOBs have to keep their heads completely in the sand to be able to ignore these facts. Or maybe they're so in bed with the Liberal pro-illegal-immigration crowd that they've forgotten how to read English (either accidentally or conveniently), and the numbers will be therefore incomprehensible to them and they'll keep up their BS?
I still want to know if Daley has a FOID card. If not, why wasn't he arrestd?
Mayor Daley is what we call in Ireland an amadon, which is Irish Gaelic for ejit, nown in Amerikay as idiot.
Where would Padric Pearse, Michael Collins, James Conolly and Eamon DeValera and Maude Gunne been without arms during the Easter 1916.
If the brave Anglo-Irishman Sir Roger Casement had been able without betrayal to deliver German weapons, the fight might have been even better for the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
A curse on phony Irishmen like Mayor Daley.
Correlation does not equal causation - this article is nothing but sloppy thinking in an attempt to justify a morally corrupt position.
America needs and deserves a sensible and sane gun policy. The gun lobby and the NRA have blood on their hands. In time they will be regarded with the same contempt as the tobacco lobby - nothing but merchants of death.
Dear Rogue: The best so-called 'gun policy' is to have no policy. The second amendment is absolute and impervious to due process short of another amendment; until then, the only gun law is the second amendment. Having a 'gun policy' is a statement that 2A is not absolute as if there were two sides, and makes about as much sense as a policy of ownership of another human being in this country. Are there two sides to that?
Freedom from being owned by another in America is absolute.
That makes two rights which are absolute in this country.
Good one, Dave.
I was wondering how the trolls would spin this. As expected, they're incapable of making a logical argument based on facts, and immediately turn to hysteria and hyperbole.
Into your own dustbin of history, Rogue.
Nicely written!
Rogue, you have used a half-truth in order to bolster a deception with the appearance of legitimacy.
Correlation does not "necessarily" equal causation, BUT causation ALWAYS equals correlation. You didn't mention that part. Your fear of examining the link between correlation and causation on this issue, suggests you already know the truth of our position, you just don't like it.
If the facts of correlation and causation are unrelated on this issue, how does one account for the consistency with which they appear? Historically you will find that where gun laws are most closely in alignment with the law (2nd amendment) violent crime goes down, and where the opposite is true crime goes up. Now that fact could be gainsayed by pointing out the different cultures of the different regions, but then how do you account for the fact that the same holds true in the same region. In that case cultural and regional differences have been removed as part of the equation, yet the same results accrue with the only difference being change in access to firearms. STrict and difficult, crime goes up, Easy and close to the intent of the 2nd amendment crime goes down. Important to note that the region didn't change, the culture didn't change only the people's access to the tools of self-defense changed. At this point an intelligent man would wonder if there wasn't some causation
explaining the correlation. Then of course there are the other men.
Dave Workman, as you may know, Chicago had one of those "gun buyback" galas around Mother's Day weekend. Naturally, Daley crowed about how the streets would be safer because of these weapons being turned in.
About a week later, an off-duty cop was shot and killed by four gangbanger types, who wanted to steal his motorbike. One of the perps was shot dead, and another wounded by the cop's father - himself, a retired police officer - who was allowed to keep his gun.
It was on the same day that this cop was being eulogized, that Daley pulled his "gun up your butt" theatrics.
Apparently, somebody forgot to tell these four thugs about the gun buyback party a week earlier.
GO 2ASAFETY!!
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