We’re all going to die.

Well, we are. Eventually. But if you listen to anti-gun activists, we’re all going to get shot dead because gun-related homicides are just plain getting out of hand. It’s an epidemic that can’t be contained unless we act now and pass gun control. We just have to!

That’s what they tell us, at least.

However, A.W.R. Hawkins over at Breitbart notes that it’s a pile of male bovine excrement.

Washington Post analysis shows Democrats, followed closely by independents, are more apt to believe firearm murders have increased. And this feeds the Democrat psyche which is already more prone to support an expansion of gun control laws.

But the reality is that the high water mark for firearm murders was 1994 while 2017, the most recent year with complete data on incidents, shows a sharp drop. There were “16,136 [firearm murders] in 1994” but only “10,982” in 2017.

Hawkins also notes that if you look at just the murder rate–homicide rates also include justified homicides, among other things–the dip is even sharper.

So why do people seem to honestly believe that we’re somehow more violent?

Well, part of that may be an artifact of how news is reported. Most of you have heard the phrase “man bites dog.” Basically, it’s used to note that the news doesn’t cover the everyday and mundane, but the odd and unusual. The rarer an act is, the more likely it is to be reported in the media. A dog biting a guy happens all the time, so no one cares, but if a man bites a dog? That’s news.

Conversely, when gun fatalities were more common, it was rare that the media could focus on them all that well. They were just something that happened.  A person would get murdered and there would be coverage, but before anyone could get into all the peripheral stuff about the homicide, like the weapons used or anything else, there would be another murder.

Today, with fewer homicides, they can delve into these other topics. Because of that, these homicides burn their way into people’s brains on a deeper level. Humans remember things through repetition, so hearing about Jane Doe’s murder every day for three weeks means you’re more likely to be remembering Jane Doe’s murder when Joe Smith is killed.

Hence, it becomes easier to believe that we’re plagued with murders when the rate is decreasing.

It should also be noted that the decrease came during a time of expanding gun rights. Americans throughout the nation were taking back their constitutionally-protect right to keep and bear arms. There were more and more guns on American streets, yet the homicide rate decreased. I have it on supposedly good authority that more guns increase the likelihood for violence, so how does that compute?

Well, that’s easy. When more of the bad guys started getting their butts shot, their buddies decided that violent crime was probably not a long-term career prospect after all. They stopped pulling that kind of stuff and went onto other things. As a result, the homicide rate dropped.

Of course, that just my own speculation.

What we know for a fact is that during a time of expanding gun rights and gun ownership, the homicide rate decreased. That’s something we’re not going to hear out of the mainstream media, mostly because it completely disproves their claim of more guns leading to more crime. They’d rather keep people ignorant and suggestible.

As for Democrats being more likely to believe that the violence is worse, is that really surprising? They accept the mainstream media at face value. The rest of us are a little less likely to do so.