Here is a recent story that will not likely receive an equitable portion of coverage in the mainstream media as the gun control agenda continues to heat up.
This incident occurred Tuesday, less than three miles from my house as it happens. The short version is that Border Patrol agents were in pursuit of two alleged illegal immigrant drug smugglers who eventually crashed their stolen vehicle and fled the scene on foot. When the suspects approached a woman who happened to be checking her mail, presumably with the intent to steal her vehicle (and who knows if they would have attempted to take her hostage as well), she opted to actively participate in her own defense rather than passively await the arrival of law enforcement officials. Ultimately, because Arizona embraces relatively liberal guns laws (no ironic pun intended), the woman legally brandished her handgun, forcing the two to reevaluate their intended target and hoof it across country on foot rather than continue their attempt at a vehicle-borne evasion. The Border Patrol eventually captured the two, a result that was clearly facilitated at least in part by the woman’s actions and preparedness for unknown potentialities. She reportedly suffered no injuries to her person or property. This is just one example of how firearms in the hands of a law-abiding, responsible citizenry can contribute to reductions of violence and criminal behavior in society.
More broadly related to this story is the oft-posited theoretical connection between access to firearms and crime – specifically murders – committed with them. Virtually all of the proposed gun policy changes that the president is seeking unilaterally and legislatively he publicly asserts will prevent gun crimes across the board – not just mass murders of the Newtown variety – by focusing on preemptive access control and restriction. Everyone from President Obama to Senator Feinstein and all the anti-gun pundits, celebrities, and politicians in between consistently fail to offer any substantive, merit-based explanations of how or why such policies will supposedly work; these conclusions are almost automatically assumed to be understood true – both by those extolling them and much of the general public – despite the plethora of available data that suggest otherwise. In simple academic terms this is what is known as speculation and conjecture, hardly characteristic of fit leadership or decision making.
The overall national firearms-related homicide rate in America has declined to its lowest level since at least 1981, despite a massive proliferation of firearms availability during that same period. While these data support the notion that an increased presence of firearms among the greater populace actually helps reduce violent crime, they do not necessarily prove this connection. What they do prove, however, is that there is absolutely no results-based correlation – whether causational or otherwise – between an increased availability of firearms and a subsequent increase in firearms-related homicide rates. This is simply a flat-out erroneous premise that foundationally lies at the heart of most gun control proponents’ conclusions, naïve or despotic.
With available statistical data and case studies that demonstrate armed citizens probably contribute to reductions/prevention of crime in a number of ways, the conclusive results that weapons-related bans do not appreciably affect criminal behavior, and the commonsense intuition that determined criminals can and will circumvent these types of restrictions in pursuit of more heinous crimes, a question that remains is whether or not the president is intellectually impotent or is he simply pursuing a broader statist agenda at the expense of law-abiding citizens’ individual rights? It can only realistically be one or the other unless we are to presume that the most powerful and invasive elected official in the history of mankind somehow does not have access to this information.
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