Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recently said that Illinois’ uptick in crime is because there are “just too damn many guns out there.”
Like many of his colleagues, Durbin blames the increase in crime on the millions of Americans who lawfully exercise their right to keep and bear arms.
Sadly, this has become an all too common talking point for anti-Second Amendment politicians, including President Joe Biden (D), who recently suggested that firearms owners and gun stores are to blame when it comes to a rise in crime.
Biden and Durbin are hardly alone in perpetuating this falsehood. When Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked if our country has a crime problem, she replied, “There is a guns problem, and that’s something the president would say.”
What these politicians miss—likely purposely—is that it’s not the tens-of-millions of law-abiding gun owners throughout the U.S. who are responsible for an uptick in violent crime. In fact, an increase in lawful gun ownership is a response to such an uptick in crime, while crime data clearly shows that the vast majority of criminals use illegal guns.
“Cynical politicians in many large cities chose to turn a blind eye to the mayhem; some even let radical groups set up so-called ‘autonomous zones,’” we previously wrote in our analysis of what’s behind the rising crime rates.
In short, it’s the criminals. Those intent on doing harm to others also break our many gun laws.
Durbin, Biden, and other anti-gun politicians continue to blame crimes on guns in the hopes they can enact increasingly restrictive pieces of gun-control legislation.
This isn’t the first time Durbin has been outspoken about his anti-Second Amendment views. In late 2019, Durbin joined a cadre of senators who actually threatened the U.S. Supreme Court with being “restructured” if justices dared to rule in favor of the individual right to keep and bear arms.
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