Good guys with guns save lives and deter criminal activity. We all know it to be true.
It was out for all to see in Indianapolis a few weeks ago as 75,000 National Rifle Association members descended on that city for the NRA’s convention and annual meetings. Many, if not most of those folks were legally armed. Not surprisingly, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department described the weekend as the quietest in all of April.
In Chicago on that same weekend, without 75,000 legally armed NRA members in town and strict gun laws prohibiting all but a tiny handful of card-carrying good guys with guns, it was just another weekend of bloody violence. Scores and scores of people robbed, shot, raped or otherwise victimized by brazen criminals just like any other time.
In fact, Chicago’s strict gun control laws are partly to blame for that city’s 532 homicides in 2012.
A half-hour west of Chicago lies Illinois’ second-largest city. Aurora doesn’t have Chicago-style gun control and would you care to guess how many homicides Aurora endured in that same 2012? ZERO. Not. A. Single. One.
It’s not rocket science: Chicago, with their strict gun control, has lots of homicides and violent crime. Aurora – and pretty much the rest of Illinois without Chicago-style strict gun control – has few homicides and relatively little violent crime.
It’s not just Illinois. Florida processed the one-millionth active concealed carry license recently and that state’s firearm-related violent crime is at historic lows. Denying a correlation between record numbers of carry licenses and record low firearm-related violent crime is simply ignoring reality.
Ironically, even the anti-gun, anti-self-defense activists know that good guys with guns deter criminal violence as evidenced by the armed security they hired at their counter-demonstration to the NRA in downtown Indianapolis. Ditto for the Brady Campaign’s recent forum in Seattle (see photo).
Michael Bloomberg pays a number of armed, former NYPD cops to guard him 24/7, while he spends tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby against your right to have a gun to defend your family from criminal violence. How’s that fair or reasonable? Smacks of hypocrisy and elitism, doesn’t it?
Gun control isn’t about making us safer. It’s about controlling people.
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