Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!
The President and the Media won’t tell you that gun deaths are down 49% since 1993.
But that’s exactly what a Pew Research Center analysis of government data shows.
Pew says:
Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.
And this gem:
The plunge in homicides after that meant that firearm homicide rates in the late 2000s were equal to those not seen since the early 1960s.
Gun control is working you say! Perhaps. But consider that The Small Arms Survey indicates that gun ownership in the United States went from 230 million firearms in 2001 to 270 million in 2007.
But that’s based on a personal surveys and not any gun registry database (yet). Many law abiding gun owners may be hesitant to answer any survey about the guns they own.
And we can be darn sure the criminals with illegal guns aren’t answering the survey.
What that would seem to indicate is that more guns equals less crime.
That’s not what the President wants you to hear. He wants you to think that there’s a mad man outside every school in the country waiting for the chance for another Sandy Hook, another Columbine, another Virginia Tech.
Don’t get me wrong. There most certainly are mad men out there (and women). But they likely don’t own their guns legally and they likely have other mental health issues.
As Rick Moran writes at The American Thinker:
It doesn’t matter of course. Gun control advocates will contiue to warn about the “epidemic” of gun violence and cite their phony stats as proof we need more legislation. They can’t have an honest debate about guns because the facts are not on their side. So we are treated to appeals to emotion and pointing to tragedies like Newtown to gin up support for gun control – even though, as the Pew study points out, killings involving more than 3 victims is less than 1% of the homicides committed.
Facts are stubborn things.