If gun control worked, we wouldn’t be seeing headlines like “Baltimore Breaks City Murder Record,” “29 Shot in Baltimore Over Memorial Day Weekend,” and “Crime Explodes In Baltimore.” After all, it was only two years ago that Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (the former mayor of Baltimore) signed into law the Firearm Safety Act of 2013—restrictive new gun-control legislation that bans many common semi-automatic rifles, outlaws the manufacture and sale of magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds, requires private transfers of firearms to take place at a Maryland State Police barracks, and institutes a ban on the purchase of more than one gun per month (with a 7-day waiting period). This is on top of the fact that concealed-carry license applications are rarely approved by the state police, and self-defense isn’t considered a valid reason to apply.
The city has all these new gun-control laws, and yet violent crime was up in Baltimore in 2014 and it’s still climbing this year. When anti-gun politicians claimed that the Firearm Safety Act wouldn’t impact the law-abiding citizens, they couldn’t have been more wrong. It sure looks like it’s the violent criminals who haven’t noticed the change in gun laws. Yet every Maryland gun owner I know is well aware of the new restrictions on their right to keep and bear arms, to the point that several have or are considering moving away from the state they love.
In Virginia, meanwhile, we haven’t passed any new anti-gun laws in a few years, despite the best efforts of our anti-gun and Bloomberg-backed governor. Not surprisingly, our violent crime rate keeps going down. Cities big and small across the Old Dominion have seen their violent crimes drop, while at the same time the number of background checks on firearm sales have soared across the state.
Oddly enough, when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was recently asked about the spike in crime in Baltimore he claimed the answer was (you guessed it) more gun-control laws! Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the same thing after another horribly violent weekend in the Windy City. Yep, more gun control in places that already have some of the most restrictive anti-gun laws in the country. More laws that the law-abiding will try to obey and the law-breaking won’t even acknowledge. More failure. More violence. But hey, the anti-gun politicians and activists will still really feel like they care more about the good people living in bad neighborhoods than those awful gun owners who think people have some sort of right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, so they’ve got that going for them.
In the meantime, those good people remain largely defenseless. The cities they live in continue to erect barriers between the citizens and their rights. The criminals continue to commit violent crimes, knowing most of the time a plea bargain awaits them if they’re caught. And the politicians proclaim that all of this will change, if only we pass the next “common-sense gun safety” bill, while more and more Americans know better.
