How REQUIRING A Gun Impacts Crime Rates

Being a Georgia resident, I’m very familiar with Kennesaw, Georgia. For those of you who aren’t, it’s the city that actually requires each and every household to have a firearm.

Advertisement

Don’t get me wrong, the law isn’t enforced. It’s actually unenforceable. But that’s not the point. It’s a middle finger to communities that think banning guns is a good thing, and in that, it works beautifully.

However, it also has an impact on other things, such as the community’s crime rate.

While the 1982 law isn’t actually enforced, the town’s mayor spoke highly of it nonetheless.

“If you’re going to commit a crime in Kennesaw and you’re the criminal — are you going to take a chance that that homeowner is a law-abiding citizen?” asked Kennesaw Mayor Derek Easterling, reports CNN.

Lt. Craig Graydon of the Kennesaw Police Department explained the law “was meant to be kind of a crime deterrent.”

And while it’s difficult to prove a causal relationship between the law and crime in the town, Kennesaw, which boasts a population of 33,000 people, has a violent crime rate of less than 2 percent and has only had one murder in the last six years.

“We can’t say that just that gun law contributes x number of percent to why we have a low crime rate. It may be part of it, but it needs to be looked at from a whole picture,” said Graydon, who’s been with the police department for 30 years.

Advertisement

However, anyone with half a brain can look at one simple fact and tell the difference.

You see, about 15 minutes away from Kennesaw is Acworth, Georgia. The two communities are easy to travel between, meaning there’s no barrier for criminals to act in one but not the other.

Yet Acworth’s crime rate is higher than normal for a community of its size. What’s the difference? Kennesaw’s gun requirement law.

It’s important to remember that while the law is basically unenforceable, it serves as a warning to criminals. They recognize that the city won’t provide barriers to the private ownership of firearms. Worse, most people will try and comply with the new law. That means the majority of the people in the town are armed.

Would you want to break into a home in that town?

Of course, anti-gun activists will look at Graydon’s inability to quantify exactly what kind of an impact the law has had as evidence it might not have had any, but that’s just willful self-delusion. To say it’s had no impact is to completely ignore the reality that criminals know there are guns in almost every home in town and thus stay out.

Advertisement

Again, this isn’t rocket science. Criminals are like anyone else. They don’t want to get shot.

As a result, they tend to try to avoid places where there’s a high likelihood of being shot. Kennesaw, with its gun law requiring people to be armed, sure sounds like a place where a criminal’s life expectancy can rapidly approach zero. There’s no way the gun law hasn’t reduced crime.

Kennesaw is probably one of the safest communities in the country, all because of the private ownership of firearms.

God bless America!

Join the conversation as a VIP Member