Ineffective Gun Control Doesn't Stop Anti-Gunners

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Published on Thursday, 25 January 2007 15:47

Written by George Szwagulak

Fact: violent crime is near a 30 year low and has dropped from its high point in 1994 of 4,115,000 incidents to our latest figure in 2005 of 1,823,400 incidents. Nevertheless, we still have urban Mayors forming an anti-gun coalition led by New York City’s Michael Bloomberg and meeting in our nation’s capital. They are scheming to try and find a way to make gun control palatable to the American people. They claim they are not persecuting the 2nd Amendment, they are merely trying to reduce crime. “It’s out of control!” they shout. No, wait… that was the 1990’s argument. Today's statistics prove that is not true today.

Mayor Bloomberg’s guest appearance at fundraisers for The Brady Campaign leaves little to the imagination as to what his clear cut anti-gun activist motives are. The Coalition of Mayors’ meeting is a dishonest ruse. It is utterly reprehensible given all that we know, and can prove, about the ineffectiveness of gun control as crime control. Nevertheless, this fraud continues to be perpetrated on the Bill of Rights. Unforgivable!

OK. Let’s play pretend, wave a magic wand, and say the Mayors get everything they are calling for. Let’s start with Ballistic Fingerprinting. Does it even pass the smell test to think that drug dealers, who are already bringing their illegal product into this country, will not start importing guns in with their already illegal drug shipments if they can make more money? Our government policing agencies, as good as they are, cannot keep illegal drugs off of our streets, and that has been a fact for more than thirty years. Criminals do what they do best. They figure out ways to make money in criminal enterprise.

Let’s look at a few cases to try and help us figure out whether or not the Bloomberg taskforce’s gun control will do any of what they are claiming it will do. After all, this is the reason they say they need more restrictions on our Constitutionally recognized and protected inalienable rights. To stop illegal guns, right?

Canada has severe restrictions on the ownership of handguns and a complete and total gun registry. This is even more gun control than what the mayors say they need to do the job. So Canada’s policies should be working if gun control is actually crime control. According to several articles, Canada’s current government was elected on promises to eliminate the gun registry. The registry has been hacked and is now inaccurate,is way too expensive,and is of little value to actual crime fighting. The police believe that the 2 billion dollar cost of the registry would have been better spent on crime fighting techniques that are known to work, like more cops, better equipment etc.

Gun controllers then try to cry, “What about England?” England has pretty much banned the civilian ownership of firearms and is an island. Therefore, it should be easy for them to stem the flow of illegal weapons if gun control actually works as crime control. According to this November 2006 article, their gun registry is worthless and the very gun-statistic-stingy Home Office says that they have 30 thousand illegal guns on their streets. They have become the western world’s leader in violent crime rates. Note also the position of Australia and Canada in this article’s graphic since they are the countries most like ours and have enacted strict gun control in the name of crime control.

Both England and Australia have recently released studies on what they are calling the “weapons culture.” The English study published December of 2006 says Sawn-off shotguns are still the weapon of choice. A purpose-built 9mm handgun, which is easier to conceal than a shotgun, is available for £1,000-£1,400 on the back streets of Britain while those wanting "a gangster image" can buy a machine gun for £800.

Did they just say machine guns are readily available to criminals? But I thought…..

Australia’s policies are a little less radical than England’s attempt to control crime using gun control. However, weapons are very strictly regulated and are tightly controlled. This includes home inspections performed by police to ensure guns are exactly where the owners say they are. This May, 2006 article says, “The criminologist says there is a proliferation of illegal hand guns and something needs to be done.” Sound familiar? How about this one? “Thousands of (homemade) pistols seized in raids.”

The Aussie government recently released a June 2006 report entitled, “Weapons, drugs and crime” . The below summary of that study was taken from this article.

The introduction of tough laws to control guns and knives appears to be failing to keep lethal weapons out of the hands of Australian criminals. …. [Analysts] reported that while new laws may have helped reduce the number of knives and guns in illicit circulation, they have failed to deter hard-core criminals. It also pointed to a large firearms black market…

The study said that drug users were more likely to use these weapons! Now there is a huge surprise! Drugs and a black market in guns… in an island nation, just like England. But worse yet, criminals have even stolen guns, for their black market, from the police themselves.

If America chooses to continue down the path of gun control, these facts are unfortunately NOT all of the bad news for the gun controllers 2nd Amendment. We can find more terrible consequences in the two most exhaustive gun control studies ever done on the planet that were conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Academy of Sciences.

The CDC studied fifty-one of the best gun control studies the world had to offer and said no study was overlooked. Their results? The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes. But in hoping against hope and throwing their fellow anti-gun buddies a bone, they said, “more studies need to be done.” More studies huh? Let’s look to another one then.

The National Academy of Sciences study is a 328-page report based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey of 80 different gun-control laws and some of its own independent study. In short, the panel could find no link between restrictions on gun ownership and lower rates of crime, firearms violence or even accidents with guns. However, they also say more studies need to be done.

Let us now reflect on what this teaches us. Fifty-one of the best studies the world has to offer, a 328-page report based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey of 80 different gun-control laws, and some new independent research yielded results that disprove any effectiveness of gun control, yet call for even more studies to be done. Like the mayors, this is just emotional people hoping they can find something other than the truth when trying to prove their anti-gun recommendations.

Even armed with all of this evidence, Mayor Bloomberg’s Coalition Against Illegal Guns will still try to enact more gun control. They hope to implement a national database of all guns and owners to accomplish their goal. They say we have nothing to fear. After all, they are not after the 2nd Amendment! This is crime control! Not gun control! It's a good thing we don't believe them. The only crime I wish I could control is the constant attack being perpetrated on our Bill of Rights.

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