Gun violence dropped dramatically nationwide over the past two decades, but nearly three-quarters of all homicides are still committed with a firearm, the Justice Department said in a report released Tuesday.Actually, you can sort of see how they'll do it in the article: "zOMG, people are still killed with guns!"
The report, by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, painted an encouraging picture of long-term trends at a time of divisive political debate over guns and legislation to regulate them. Firearms-related homicides declined 39 percent between 1993 and 2011, the report said, while nonfatal firearms crimes fell 69 percent during that period.
But the numbers have dropped drastically. That's despite the lapsing of the AR/large cap magazine ban nine years ago. That's despite a lot more states' liberalizing their concealed-carry laws.
Note also that if you add the "crooks got guns by stealing" and "from friends and family", that's damn near 80% of their pipeline. Buying guns at gun shows.. less than 1%. So the gun control bill ballyhooed by the President and most of the senators in his party would have added burdens to those who follow the law and would have inconvenienced criminals not at all.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they'll spin this one.
2 comments:
No need to spin it. *ALL* crime is down over the past twenty years. It's not surprising that murders committed with guns are down over that same time. So are burglaries. So are muggings. So are rapes.
According to a sociologist at a university that I attended, the most important predicator of crime rates is demographic -- the 17 to 27 cohort commits the vast majority of crimes. Well, we had the Baby Boom and a burst of crime, then we had the Boomer Echo and a burst of crime. But the Echo kids have aged out of the violent crime cohort, leaving fewer kids to be committing crimes. He has all sorts of graphs and charts showing how closely crime rates follow the demographics. And here's the kicker: *Current crime rates are still almost exactly following this model.*
Given that guns have always been readily obtainable and usable by criminals regardless of gun laws, it doesn't surprise me that relaxing gun laws essentially has had zero impact on this demographic curve. It does surprise me that putting a huge demographic in prison or on probation, the result of the War on Drugs and the criminalization of behavior that used to be handled via other mechanisms (such as acting out in school), has not affected this curve. Seems to put the lie on the whole "tough on crime = low crime" thing... but that's a topic for another post.
Spin... that's ALL they will do is spin the numbers to advance their agenda...
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