The city of Atlanta has sort of dominated a lot of the news around guns and gun control of late. That’s because of a festival canceling there in the city and the cancelation being blamed on state gun laws.

The fact that those laws have existed for nearly a decade and the state supreme court decision that would have impacted the festival was decided in 2019, so organizers clear had time to figure out a Plan “B,” but whatever.

However, the law at the center of all this controversy is deridingly called the Guns Everywhere law. Yet, interestingly, one of the Atlanta news stations reports that the law didn’t actually increase shootings in the city.

A Georgia gun law enacted eight years ago, cited as the reason for this week’s surprise cancellation of Music Midtown, required public parks to be among the places legal gun owners were allowed to carry firearms.

Opponents of that law said it would spike gun violence, but Atlanta crime data indicates that argument is debatable.

…

And while gun violence did go up, Atlanta police data shows that:

• From 2010 to 2014, the number of shooting incidents in the city rose by 26%.
• From 2014 to 2018, they rose by only 19%.

“Democrats promised that the sky would fall, and it didn’t,” said Brian Robinson, who was a top aide to Deal in 2014.

In other words, the increase following the law’s passage–it passed in 2014–is less than it had been for the same period before its passage.

Once again, anti-gunners claimed the streets would run red with blood, only they didn’t.

And really, why would they? Criminals were already carrying wherever they wanted regardless of what the law said. All the bill did was give gun owners more opportunities to carry a firearm, reducing the number of prohibited places in the state.

And really, Atlanta is kind of the crime epicenter for the entire state.

While crime rates were going up there, they were trending downward for the state as a whole. So if there were going to be negative consequences of that law passing, you’d see them in Atlanta.

Except, we don’t.

If anything, it reduced the issue significantly, which isn’t surprising either since we know guns save lives.

This makes all this nonsense about the Piedmont Park music festival so ridiculous. The law in question not only isn’t new but hasn’t led to problems either. At no point should this have happened. The fact that it did almost suggests organizers intended to stir up debate on the gun issue.

I can’t say definitively that they did, but it seems awfully convenient that someone was willing to tell the press that the issue was a law from 2014 and a state supreme court decision from 2019 despite the fact that it would make the organizers look like idiots to a lot of people.

Regardless, the law in question isn’t a problem. It’s never been a problem, and even the Atlanta media is forced to look at the facts and say, “Nope. The law isn’t an issue.”

That ought to tell you something.