Stick to the Facts: There is No Justifiable Reason to Ban Guns

9 January 2013 / 0 Comments

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After last summer’s shooting in Aurora, Colorado and last month’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, anti-gun advocates want you to believe that America is a nation infected with violent crimes and murders. They want you to believe that we are one, if not the, most violent nation in the world and that we have to rid the nation of guns to solve the problem.

But what are the real facts?

Amidst the Noise released a video on You Tube that provides some very stunning facts about violent crimes in the US and Great Britain that anti-gun advocates don’t want you to know this.

For instance, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States Table 1, violent crimes in the US have dropped by nearly 50% in the last twenty years. In 1992, there were 757.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people. In 2011, there were only 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 people. That’s a reduction of 49%.

In the same Table 1, we also see that there were 9.3 homicides per 100,000 people in 1992 and that number dropped to 4.7 homicides per 100,000 in 2011. That’s a reduction of 49.4% in the homicide rate in the past twenty years.

The politicians also want you to believe that assault rifles are responsible for many of the homicides that occur and that they need to be banned. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States Table 8, there was a total of 12,664 homicides reported in 2011. Of those, 8,583 were committed with a firearm. Of those, only 323 were committed with a rifle. Now realize that assault rifles are a subset of the 323, which means that they account for less than 3.8% of homicides committed by firearms and less than 2.6% of all homicides.

Have you ever wondered where the highest concentrations of violent crime are? Again turning to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States Table 16, we find that the vast majority of violent crimes are occurring in America’s largest cities. In 2011, there were 754.5 violent crimes per 100,000 people in cities with populations of 250,000 or more. Compare that to the national average that year of 386.3 per 100,000 and see where most of the violent crimes are occurring. Incidentally, the locations of this highest violent crime rates also corresponds to the areas that vote Democrat and re-elected Barack Obama.

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Thursday, January 10, 2013