One of the trolls suggested I may be opposed to saving lives by imposing gun control. But there is a possibility that a gun control law has prevented a killer from acquiring a gun – but there is an absolute certainty that every regularly enforced law restricting citizens access to firearms has cost lives. In the United States case more than 800,000 excess deaths since 1963.
The chart below shows the US homicide rate from 1880, with the data from 1900 from the Department of Justice, the total before 1899 from a study. As you can see, prior to 1895 the homicide rate was essentially flat, with labor problems pushing the murder total up from 1896 to 1905. And then the murder of a governor triggered a rush for restrictions on carry, and the results you can see.
As more, and more restrictive gun laws were added, the homicide rate rose until 1933, when the Depression forced such laws to become dead letters in most jurisdictions. With the pressure to disarm the people off, crime and murder rates fell through WWII, and more slowly but still falling until the pressure on the entertainment industry to shift violent programming to late hours impelled Hollywood to begin a gun control campaign. A campaign that continues to this day, but has been taken o`ver by the political left who demand laws at least as strict as the Soviet Unions.
Since January 1, 1964, more than 800,000 more murders ocurred than would have ocurred had the decline in violent crime continued at the same rate as it had between 1950 and 1964. At present, more than half of the murders reported to the FBI are in excess of the number that would have been murdered had the gun control campaign never begun.
And now that we have relaxed gun laws to the point we were at half the rate of 1993, before the deliberate violence of this year’s revolutionaries and urban terrorists, the gun ban advocates want to restore the laws that caused the surge in violent crime to begin with, and make them even harsher. In fact, they want to punish those who have committed no crime and almost certainly will never commit a crime while they let the criminals off scot free.
Stranger