{"id":65079,"date":"2021-02-21T12:54:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T18:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65079"},"modified":"2021-02-21T12:54:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T18:54:00","slug":"65079","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=65079","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Data show gun control doesn’t reduce US violent crime<\/a>
\nBy James Meagher<\/p>\n

Certain that yet another round of gun control laws are needed to reduce violent crime in the U.S., activists have forgotten two fundamental issues.\u00a0\u00a0The first is that people who murder, rape, rob, or assault pay little attention to our laws.\u00a0\u00a0Perpetrators of violent crime will not be stopped by anything but an opposing force.\u00a0\u00a0The second issue is that gun control laws have never been shown to be effective.\u00a0\u00a0Gun control advocates are adamant that the pages and pages of anti-2nd Amendment legislation are effective and the country needs more.\u00a0\u00a0No proof is needed; they just know it.\u00a0\u00a0The reality is that impartial data show that these activists are completely wrong.<\/p>\n

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While those passionately supportive of gun control have convinced the gullible that severe restrictions on firearms will eliminate violent crime in the U.S., this is just not true.\u00a0\u00a0As we have been urged to do during the COVID-19 pandemic, we must examine the data, follow the science, and do the math on gun control and violent crime.\u00a0\u00a0To accomplish this, consider the most recent full year of data from the FBI publication “Crime in the US, 2019<\/a>” and a legal expert’s rating on the relative severity of gun control in each state from the\u00a0Traveler’s Guide to the Firearm Laws of the Fifty States<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Data from these sources is graphed for each state and presented in Figure 1.\u00a0\u00a0The blue dots indicate the crime rate per 100,000 state residents.\u00a0\u00a0The higher the blue dot is on the graph, the greater the violent crime rate for that state.\u00a0\u00a0Crime rate values are displayed on the right-hand vertical axis.\u00a0\u00a0The relative firearm freedom in each state is indicated with a red bar.\u00a0\u00a0A short red bar indicates that a state has very restrictive firearm laws.\u00a0\u00a0A tall red bar indicates a relatively high acceptance of residents’ 2nd Amendment rights.\u00a0\u00a0The relative firearm freedom rating, from 0 for total prohibition to 100 for total freedom, is displayed on the left-hand vertical axis.<\/p>\n

With the states arranged in order of decreasing violent crime rate from left to right, all it takes is a glance at the figure, and it is obvious that there is no discernible relationship between the two data sets.\u00a0\u00a0This means that there is no link between the rate of violent crime in a state and a state’s firearm freedom.\u00a0\u00a0The only valid conclusion is that gun control does not have a predictable outcome regarding violent crime.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder that the volumes of state and federal gun control legislation do not have much impact on our violent crime rates?\u00a0\u00a0Yet year after year, our legislators add more gun control laws to the books, expecting different results each time.<\/p>\n

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The facts prove conclusively that gun control laws cannot reliably reduce the violent crime rate in our country.\u00a0\u00a0Is there anything that might be effective?\u00a0\u00a0Possibly.\u00a0\u00a0Consider the next figure.\u00a0\u00a0In Figure 2, the FBI data for violent crime are shown again.\u00a0\u00a0The blue dots indicate the crime rate per 100,000 state residents.\u00a0\u00a0The higher the blue dot is on the graph, the greater the violent crime rate for that state.\u00a0\u00a0For the same year, the U.S. Census Bureau’s data for\u00a0poverty in the states<\/a>\u00a0has been added as red triangles.\u00a0\u00a0The higher the red triangle is on the graph, the greater the poverty rate for that state.\u00a0\u00a0Values for the percentage of state residents in poverty are displayed on the left-hand vertical axis.<\/p>\n

Just a glance at Figure 2 reveals that there is a recognizable trend for poverty and violent crime.\u00a0\u00a0States with lower poverty rates generally have lower rates of violent crime.\u00a0\u00a0Upon seeing this correlation, it is logical to conclude that anyone genuinely interested in reducing violent crime needs to be fighting poverty.<\/p>\n

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We can make progress as a nation only when we examine unbiased information and are able to think logically.\u00a0\u00a0Unsupported opinions, willful ignorance of the facts, and emotional objections to the truth are dangerous obstacles to reducing violent crime in our country.\u00a0\u00a0Deliberately promoting the myth that stricter firearm laws will reduce violent crime serves only to steer us away from real solutions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Data show gun control doesn’t reduce US violent crime By James Meagher Certain that yet another round of gun control laws are needed to reduce violent crime in the U.S., activists have forgotten two fundamental issues.\u00a0\u00a0The first is that people who murder, rape, rob, or assault pay little attention to our laws.\u00a0\u00a0Perpetrators of violent crime … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65080,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65079\/revisions\/65080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}