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States Punish The Rural For The Sins Of The City

With many states holding their State of the State addresses recently, governors roll out their legislative agendas. They like to throw out a broad sampling of legislation that hits on many different things.

For anti-gun lawmakers, that routinely involved gun control.

The governor of Maryland, for example, offered this:

Governor Larry Hogan introduced a wide variety of legislative efforts in Wednesday’s State of the State address in Annapolis, including a handful of initiatives aimed at tighter gun control in Maryland.

Maryland already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. But, you can still legally buy a rifle or a shotgun from an unlicensed seller, and never go through a background check.

“Every issue I have talked about here today, and all of the bills you will be considering over the next 61 days, are important and worthy of debate and discussion,” Hogan said in his speech.”But none of them are nearly as important as addressing the out-of-control violent crime, the shootings, and murders that are destroying Baltimore City.”

Now, I’m not about to say that Baltimore isn’t violent. It is and we all know it.

However, there’s a problem that lawmakers like Hogan rarely seem to notice, and that’s how the same gun laws that apply to the rest of the state–the same gun laws that seem to be plenty everywhere else–don’t seem to deter the violence we see in a city like Baltimore.

So Hogan wants to tighten gun laws throughout the state because one particular locality can’t seem to play well with one another.

I’m sorry, but if the gun laws were the problem, then one would expect to see that level of violence more or less across the entire state. We don’t. Smaller, rural communities don’t have that level of violence in Maryland. Not even close, yet they’re governed by the same gun control laws.

It’s not just in Maryland, either.

No, the same holds true across all 50 states in this great nation. That’s especially true in many anti-gun states like Illinois. After all, Chicago has been dubbed “Chiraq” because its violence was worse than an active war zone. Yet the rest of the state was mostly peaceful and quiet.

Why is that?

For better or worse, violence tends to be centered in a handful of neighborhoods in our major cities. Something about those neighborhoods leads to people becoming more likely to be criminals. That leads to violence.

Yet why should those in the rural communities be forced to suffer for the sins of the inner cities? The fact that cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore can’t get their crap in line shouldn’t cause those who had nothing to do with the problems to be punished.

There’s a lot of animosity from the rural parts of our nation toward the cities, and this is a fair bit of why that exists. It’s not all of it by a long shot, but folks in the country are sick of having to clean up the cities messes, especially when it has long-lasting repercussions on their civil liberties.

The rural parts of the state didn’t do this. They’re not responsible for this. So how about people stop looking at them to shoulder the burden of fixing it, especially when your plan won’t fix anything?