It’s taken as a matter of faith among the gun control crowd–and among parts of the general public–that increased gun sales will lead to increases in firearm-related crime. More guns, more crime is the argument and we’ve seen it aplenty.
And if you know nothing else, it sounds like something that would make some kind of sense. After all, if there are more guns in circulation, then more guns will somehow find their way into the hands of criminals. Or so one might imagine.
Yet our friends over at The Truth About Guns made an interesting point recently.
We have some terrible news for the Gun Control Industry™. The CDC — yes, the same CDC that desperately wanted more taxpayer dollars for more “gun violence research” — is reporting that firearm-related homicides fell in 2022. If you’re a regular reader, you know that 2022 was smack-dab in the very fattest part of the now 50-month gun-buying binge the American public embarked on during the pandemic and the George Floyd Summer of Love.
But wait, you say. How can that possibly be true? We’ve been told by all of the smartest people that more guns mean more dead people. That having a gun in the home means it’s far more likely to shoot you than you are to use it against a criminal. How could the number of dead bodies possibly have dropped?
Well, gun-grabbers, read ’em and weep . . .
Provisional CDC data from 2022 saw 5.9 deaths per 100,000 people, about a 6% decrease from 2021.However, last year’s numbers are still substantially higher than the 2019 rate of 4.4 deaths per 100,000.
Oh. My. God. That’s absolutely devastating news for our friends in the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex. It’s so bad, in fact, that the White House is trying to take credit for it.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1715442765906006125?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1715442765906006125%7Ctwgr%5E5da3bc1e91bd24e4edf82581bf10865b918b7f95%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetruthaboutguns.com%2Fcdc-data-show-gun-homicides-fell-in-the-middle-of-americas-historic-gun-buying-spree%2F
Of course, there’s been nothing the Biden administration did that could account for the dip in homicides in 2022, but that won’t stop them from claiming it did.
In fairness, pretty much anyone else in that office would claim it as well.
But that’s kind of irrelevant right now. What’s relevant is the drop in the homicide rate all while record gun sales are happening all over the nation.
See, anti-gunners like to blame gun sales for high crime rates, but they’re getting the cause and effect backward. High crime rates spark people to buy guns in record numbers. Gun sales are the effect and crime is the cause.
And when this happens, it’s just a matter of time before criminals figure out that violent crime might not be the best life choice they can make. Either enough of their buddies get shot or they get wise to what’s happening but either way, they decide to walk a different path, at least for a time.
As a result, the violent crime rates, especially the homicide rate, tend to take a bit of a dip.
Unfortunately, for anti-gunners, that’s never the case. See again, the Biden administration’s claim that they’re responsible for that dip with absolutely no supporting evidence.
Yet if anything, gun control actually kept the rate from dropping still lower.
Anytime you try to disarm responsible gun owners or keep non-criminals from buying guns of any kind, you tend to only empower those who care nothing for the law in the first place. Those of us who would only use a firearm at the range, in a sporting context, or in defense of ourselves or others would find ourselves shut out thus making life easier for the criminals.
Yet all of this is far more esoteric than the average anti-gunner can handle.
What they can understand, even if they choose to ignore it, is that if more guns mean more crime, then why did crime go down when gun sales were reaching record numbers? Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but causation should lead to correlation.
These numbers suggest that there’s no causation there. Plain and simple.
