Progressive efforts to take firearms from the hands of law-abiding citizens may be rounding a corner in the arms race of government overreach. A new report from ProPublica and The New York Times suggests gun control advocates may be turning their attention away from the failed narrative against intimidating-looking assault weapons, raising the specter of a new menace to take their place: handguns.
Using data that’s been available anytime they cared to look, the reporters stumbled across this well-known fact:
“It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.”
Whoa, dude.
Read far enough, and the article gets around to acknowledging the inconvenient truth that homicides in which guns were used have declined steadily and dramatically over the past 20 years. But the authors don’t pair that information with another significant fact: Americans – already ahead of other developed nations in per-capita gun ownership – are buying more and more guns, even as the so-called “gun murder” rate has declined.
The article’s one observation that merits much more attention from the left is this:
“Annually, 5,000 to 6,000 black men are murdered with guns. Black men amount to only 6 percent of the population. Yet of the 30 Americans on average shot to death each day, half are black males.
“…Even as homicide rates have held steady or declined for most Americans over the last decade, for black men the rate has sometimes risen. But it took a handful of mass shootings in 2012 to put gun control back on Congress’s agenda.”
Oh, so there’s a political component to this whole gun control thing? An insincere, dishonest one – one that ignores cultural problems that progressive policies (policies that have nothing to do with guns) have only fomented and exacerbated?
The authors didn’t say that. But it’s between every line of the progressive gun control agenda.:confused2:
Using data that’s been available anytime they cared to look, the reporters stumbled across this well-known fact:
“It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.”
Whoa, dude.
Read far enough, and the article gets around to acknowledging the inconvenient truth that homicides in which guns were used have declined steadily and dramatically over the past 20 years. But the authors don’t pair that information with another significant fact: Americans – already ahead of other developed nations in per-capita gun ownership – are buying more and more guns, even as the so-called “gun murder” rate has declined.
The article’s one observation that merits much more attention from the left is this:
“Annually, 5,000 to 6,000 black men are murdered with guns. Black men amount to only 6 percent of the population. Yet of the 30 Americans on average shot to death each day, half are black males.
“…Even as homicide rates have held steady or declined for most Americans over the last decade, for black men the rate has sometimes risen. But it took a handful of mass shootings in 2012 to put gun control back on Congress’s agenda.”
Oh, so there’s a political component to this whole gun control thing? An insincere, dishonest one – one that ignores cultural problems that progressive policies (policies that have nothing to do with guns) have only fomented and exacerbated?
The authors didn’t say that. But it’s between every line of the progressive gun control agenda.:confused2:
unk:
