The ‘Real and Bloody’ Truth About Legally Owned Guns
Yesterday the New York Times published this article, which is a classic example of the feckless and blustering BS that is routinely passed on as valid arguments for gun control. The story opens with this paragraph:
About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.
First I’ll tackle the touchy-feely “sensibility” of Chicago’s ban on handguns. The ban on handguns was ruled unconstitutional. The “sensibility” of the ban was not a factor even argued. The Supreme Court ruled that “the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment right recognized in Heller.” That seems pretty concrete to me — you want to ban guns, change the Constitution.
Second I’ll tackle the author’s expectation of “real and bloody” results. Washington, D.C. had a similar ban until 2008, when it was overturned by District of Columbia V. Heller. A year after lifting the gun ban in D.C., the murder rate dropped by 25 percent. That’s not very compelling evidence to cry bloody murder after the McDonald ruling lifted Chicago’s ban.
The empirical evidence shows quite the opposite in fact. If you want to increase crime rates, decrease the number of legally-owned guns. After Chicago enacted their ban in 1982, the next ten years saw murders increase by 41 percent; 2.2 times more than the national average for the same period. How does that indicate effective results of gun control or an ensuing blood bath once the ban is lifted? It doesn’t. It indicates that when you prevent citizens from legally protecting themselves you increase crime rates, plain and simple.
McDonald v. Chicago should be regarded as a strong victory for gun rights advocates as well as for constitutionalists and we’ll see in the years to come if there will truly be ‘real and bloody’ results.
Oh, for all those dunderheads who argue the Second Amendment is for militias, not individuals, here is one definition of the word ‘militia’ provided by the New Oxford Dictionary: “all able-bodied civilians eligible by law for military service.”
Stick that in your peace pipe and smoke it.