When I was drawing government pay, Oscar Brand was popular on the base, leading to memories of a tune titled, in part, “Four Letter Words That Never Say What They Mean.” The sort of words the gun ban activists say “gun control will make our streets SAFER.” Or instead of the definite “will” the use indefinite terms such as “it is reasonable,” or the always popular “the situation is critical, we must take effective action.”
As a general statement, “crime rates are inversely proportional to the degree to which the law abiding are armed.” That is, MORE GUNS MEAN LESS CRIME. restrictive gun laws reduce the number of guns, ease the fears those who live outside the law have of being instantly punished by their intended victims, and send violent crime rates sky high.
Of course, social and economic factors modify the rate at which violent crime rises,with the worst situation being one of high unemployment, economic uncertainty, and someone stirring up the mob with real or fancied injustices.
To give one example of hundreds, in the first five years of the 20th Century America was rocked by labor violence. Workers demanded a living wage and a forty hour week, owners refused, the workers struck, the owners brought in replacement workers,called “scabs,” and fired the workers. Tempers flared, and the homicide rte from 0.9 to 1.7 per 100,000, almost doubling in a few years. And then someone set a bomb that killed a governor and a wave of laws against unlicensed concealed carry hit America.
The result can be taken from the chart below, with the post 1900 homicide rate coming from Department of Justice sources.
The results of the wave of restrictive gun laws that swept the United States in 1905 and 1906 can easily be seen. Murder became relatively popular, and the homicide rate went vertical.
On the other hand, gun control fever struck again after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Times were better, and tensions were political instead of economic, so the curve rose more gradually to a peak in the early 1990’s, when ou national homicide rate hit “Second World” levels, which begin at 10 per 100,000.
But some areas were not content with Second World murder levels, and pushed gun control even further, far past the beginning of the Third World level of violent crime, with homicide rates of over 30 per 100,000 population. Chicago, for example:
The whoe history of crime and violence in the Second Ciy is laid out, from the spike resulting from the Haymarket Riots to the spike driven by a ban on legally owned guns, to the spike caused by arresting the gang leaders who were keeping the lid on .
And to the decline brought on by trafficking legally purchased guns into Chicago, with those guns offered to the law abiding who were desperate enough for self protection to pay multiples of the dealer price.
If time allowed and reader patience were inexhaustable, I could post thousands of charts showing exactly the same thing, modified by social and economic conditions prevalent when at the time and place restrictive gun laws were imposed.
There are no weaseling words that do not say what they mean in the official crime data used to prepare these charts. While many Police agencies do selectively report crimes to keep the politicians happy, I have yet to find one that reported more crime than the public reported. So, as a general rule, either “Crime is inversely proportional to the percentage of the population who has a gun” or the simpler “More guns mean less crime” is nothing more than the unvarnished truth.
Do not be taken in by any claim that gun control will make anyone safer. The history of gun control shows 58,303 failures out of the same number of enforced gun restrictions, the longest run of abject failures in recorded history.
Stranger