Today’s post is the latest in this saga of protecting the Constitution and the Second Amendment, two concepts that are essential to Americans’ pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
1) The following graphic was in a recent article in the Washington Post, despite the Second Amendment (double click on the graph for a bigger look):
Interesting trend, the violent crime rate has gone down by almost 50% in just one generation (twenty years) despite the Second Amendment.
Could it be that more and more Americans are living in states that allow its citizens to more freely utilize their Second Amendment rights, as pointed out by Rob Vance, who blogs at No Lawyers — Only Guns and Money? He generated a chart that’s just as nice as the Washington Post’s chart. The only difference is that, instead of showing just the FBI’s decreased crime numbers, it also includes data about increases in the percentage of citizens that live in states where the right to carry a concealed weapon is in effect:
2) Let’s look at what has happened in Washington D.C. over past few years. Washington at one time had a very tough and restrictive set of laws relative to gun possession. However, frustrated and scared citizens living in crime infested neighborhoods rebelled and filed suit to overturn the restrictions on their Second Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, agreed with them and invalidated the D.C. anti-gun laws. As expected, gun control advocates forecasted that Washington, D.C.’s high crime rate would go through the roof as more citizens armed themselves. However, just the opposite happened as explained by John Lott in a March 2010 in a Fox news opinion piece:
But Armageddon never arrived. Quite the contrary, murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that is now down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, Washington’s lowest since 1967. While other cities have also fared well over the last year, D.C.’s drop was several times greater than that for other similar sized cities. According to preliminary estimates by the FBI, nationwide murders fell by a relatively more modest 10 percent last year and by about 8 percent in other similarly sized cities of half a million to one million people (D.C.’s population count is at about 590,000)
Coincidence or cause and effect? You decide, especially in light of the Chicago situation.
3) Newsmax reported on February 22, 2013 that 23 U.S. Congressmen and women had sent a signed letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, urging them to prosecute existing gun laws before any further restrictions and violations of the Second Amendment were put into place, citing the following facts and realities:
- The letters cited a Syracuse University study that show firearms prosecutions under President George W. Bush peaked at 11,015 in 2004 while the Obama administration has prosecuted about 7,774 firearms cases in 2012.
- This either indicates that gun violence is down, meaning there is no urgency to implement strict gun control laws or the Obama administration is not doing its job under existing gun control laws, again meaning there is no urgency to implement strict gun control laws.
- A quote from the letter goes as follows: “We must all be looking for ways to prevent senseless acts of violence and the taking of innocent life but the best place to start would be enforcing the laws that Congress has already enacted.”
- Given the high rate of violent crime rise in Chicago, the President’s hometown, the lawmakers’ letter is quick to point out that the Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago, is the lowest ranked of all Federal court districts in gun-related prosecutions despite a surge in Chicago area gun-related violence.
- “In a city like Chicago, which saw 506 murders last year, it is appalling that the U.S. attorney’s office in that jurisdiction only prosecuted 25 federal firearms cases during 2011,” the group wrote.
- The letter asserts that of the 76,142 gun permit requests that were denied following background checks by Federally-licensed firearms dealers, only 4,732 were referred for prosecution. Of that total, only 62 prosecutions resulted.
- This translates into a prosecution rate of a measly .08% on over 76,000 denials of gun permits and a not much better prosecution rate of 1.31% of cases that are referred for prosecution.
4) But not only do these Congress people get the insanity of adding more laws when the existing laws are not obeyed and enforced, Vice President Joe Biden in his own colorful way has also reached the same conclusion. On January 31, 2013, Politico reported on Biden’s quotes where he essentially conceded the point made by the 23 Congress people above, that doing something that does not work is better than doing nothing:
“Nothing we’re going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting or guarantee that we will bring gun deaths down to a thousand a year from what we’re at now.”
Despite this statement, he still wants new restrictions on Second Amendment rights. Which always gets us back to Einstein’s popular saying when it comes to Biden: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." It is insanity to pass more restrictive gun laws but let’s do it anyway.
5) The New York Daily news reported on December 29, 2012 that Chicago suffered is 500th homicide for the whole year of 2012 that day. The Pentagon reported after this date that 310 American soldiers had died in Afghanistan fighting in 2012. Still think that strict gun laws for law abiding citizens is a good idea?
The best way to prevent more mass school killings like Newtown is very simple: somehow find about $7 billion a year in the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal government wastes every year and use it to fund and place a trained, professional, armed law enforcement officer in every U.S. school. It is that simple, so simple that smart people would have figured it out already and resourceful people would have already deployed the resources to protect our kids.
Instead, the Washington wasteful spending and bad priorities continue, the Washington blather continues, and our kids are as unprotected today as the were the day the Newtown shootings went down.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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