Surprise! More guns in America doesn’t mean more murders

The 24/7 media, and Obama administration-blessed, message to America is: there are too many guns in the hands of American citizens and that’s why there are so many mass shootings. But, surprise, that’s not true at all.

Andrew Cline’s piece for The Federalist puts and end to the myths perpetrated on a trusting public on the 5, 6, and 10 o’clock news:

America is awash in guns, and crime is at record lows. For the average American alive today, the odds of being murdered have never been lower, even though Americans possess millions more firearms…

The gulf between the facts about guns and the public’s perception is immense, and was created deliberately. Anti-gun advocates invent new terms (“assault weapon”) and politicians lie to win over a skeptical public. Too often these myths are swallowed by journalists and celebrities who don’t bother to check the data and don’t know how modern firearms actually work.

The public doesn’t need to wait on others to check the data. They can do it themselves. Instead, many trust the sensational headlines, like the one Cline cites from The Boston Globe: “The United States has been pummeled by gun violence since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.” If taken at face value, most readers will accept it as fact. But a little digging would have revealed, as Cline points out, all violence in America has been on a 20-year decline.

Both homicides and gun violence have been shrinking since 1993 and it’s hard to separate the fact that gun ownership rose in that same time frame. The number of guns per person rose from 0.94 to 1.45. Other stats in Cline’s report show the gun homicide rate falling in that time period by 49%, bringing the total down from 7 per 100,000 to just 3.6. A Pew Research Center report from last year shows that non-fatal gun victimizations have fallen from 725.3 to 174.8 per 100,000 people. That’s dramatic and should be blaring in the nightly news.

Instead, the fear mongering over AR-15 “assault” rifles blasts from the speakers, with emphasis on how “scary” they look. But what a shift in attitudes there would be if viewers were presented with actual facts.

Would it be so difficult to report the FBI statistics showing a nearly 30% increase in purchases of “assault” rifles between 2010-2014? And that during those four years, murders by those same rifles fell? Each year there was a drop, as Cline notes: “367 in 2010; 332 in 2011; 298 in 2012; 285 in 2013; and 248 in 2014.”

“The data produce one inescapable conclusion,” Cline states. “The entire premise for a new ‘assault weapons’ ban — that the proliferation of ‘assault weapons’ has led to unprecedented carnage — is completely untrue.”

It’s an inescapable fact that America is a violent country, but instead of focusing on the depravity of man, politics and the media focuses on America’s “obsession” with guns. To them, it’s better to blame an inanimate object, incapable of killing without the presence of a human hand and will, than ever admit that some people have murderous hearts.

Facts are scary things, sometimes.