An Inconvenient Truth about Guns and Violence

One great thing about being a radical liberal (or even a liberal Republican, whatever exactly that is), is that you don’t ever have to use facts.

But even by that standard, former mayor and current member of the Falls Church City Council, David Snyder, in his anti-gun screed in the Falls Church News Press, “Time for Insanity to be Replaced by Reason” (January 7th), uses not even one verifiable fact whatsoever; only emotional hyperbole. In his hyper-emotionalism he doesn’t even pretend to advance answers, only vague generalities.

Since Snyder is a self-styled Republican, at least from time to time, his thinking is a good example to illustrate the state of the current gun debate. His emotion based reaction typifies the President and the left-wing mindset not only as it reflects their dismissiveness of the Second Amendment, but their growing willingness (as shown by the current and last U.S. Attorneys General and the current Virginia Attorney General) to set modifiers around the the Bill of Rights generally, especially the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and religion, and the Fourth Amendment.

To briefly review, Snyder asserts centrally, without support that, “we keep failing to provide adequate regulation of guns and the killings mount.”

Sorry, that actually is wrong. Violent crime in the U.S. has been falling for over a decade, while at the same time firearm ownership has increased dramatically.

There were 10,225 firearm murders in 2006, a number that has fallen steadily to 8,124 in 2014.

While the U.S. has a murder rate of 4.7 per 100,000 (111th in the world, out of 218 countries) the majority of those murders are concentrated in liberal-Democratically run cities with extremely prohibitive gun laws (such as Washington, D.C.). Let’s review:

Detroit, 54.6 per 100,000
New Orleans, 53.2
St Louis, 35.5
Baltimore, 34.9: followed by Newark, Oakland, Stockton, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., which range from 34.4 to 17.1 respectively.

The truth is that the vast majority of America outside these cities, is extremely safe, by any standard or measure in the world.

This is evident right her in the greater Washington Metro area. Washington, D.C., with a population of about 650,000, had 213 murders in 2013 while much larger Fairfax County, 1.1 million, where guns are readily and legally available (and concealed carry permits are issued to responsible citizens), had only 8 murders.

Tragically, the vast number of firearm murders in the U.S. are due to drug and gang activities in inner cities that have draconian gun laws. Even more depressingly, minorities make up a majority of the firearm murder rates. No one seems to care about that, however.

Drug and gang activity are clearly the core reason for murders in this country; yet all we hear from emotionally driven politicians like Obama and Snyder is that we need more regulation on law abiding citizens – not the people who would never, and do never, obey the law in the first place.

[This even tracks across to the school and theater shootings we’ve had – setting aside Islamic terrorism as in Fort Hood, Tennessee, and recently California – which, as tragic as each event is, remain extremely rare. Almost every single incident has involved the use of powerful, psycho-therapeutic drugs and dark lifestyle issues.]

If the President, Snyder and the other radicals were sincerely interested in gun violence in the U.S., they would not be attacking the Bill of Rights, they’d be advocating and proposing ways to attack the gangs and drugs in the inner city and the rampant drug use in the suburbs that supports that drug business – not to mention proposals to reverse the destruction of the family unit and the loss of the civil community in our inner cities.