New Data Shows Crime Rose During Riots, Anti-Law Enforcement Pushes

Recent FBI crime data shows that 2020 saw more than a 5% increase in violent crime from the year prior. Perhaps most troubling among the statistics is that homicides rose nearly 30% last year.

“For the first time in four years, the estimated number of violent crimes in the nation increased when compared with the previous year’s statistics,” wrote the FBI in a press release.

Cynical, anti-gun politicians will purport that America’s millions of new gun owners are to blame. They make this claim even though many, if not most of these new gun owners are simply making a practical decision to protect themselves from violent criminals. The truth is, it’s the criminals, not the guns, as we have often written here at A1F.com.

They make this claim even though rioters were often unimpeded as they set urban areas on fire across the country in 2020. Also, the “defund the police” movement from the Left, as well as the release of many prisoners during the pandemic, also obviously impacted the violent crime rate.

But that kind of honest policy analysis is politically unpalatable to the Biden administration.

Instead, President Joe Biden (D) likes to make the untrue argument that “gun violence has become an epidemic in America.” Even his director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, echoed this misguided claim when she said that the CDC needs to go after the Second Amendment to “cure” this “epidemic.”

“Besides the fallacy of using the term ‘epidemic’ to describe violent crime when discussing the criminal misuse of firearms, the talk is nonsense when you look at criminal violence over the past few decades. Until 2020, America had seen a long, overall decline in violent crime. [2020] saw a rise—in some cities even a surge. That, however, had nothing to do with gun ownership and rising gun sales, and everything to do with riots, movements to defund the police, and factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic,” we reported earlier this year.

In sum, politicians such as Biden don’t blame the criminals, as that honesty would run counter to their desire to pass more gun-control legislation; instead, they waste resources by blaming law-abiding Americans for the actions of criminals.

“[T]he fact is, they would rather kill the Second Amendment than save lives. They’d rather blame NRA members and law-abiding gun owners for the violent crime wave they know that they enabled, and, in many cases, created, cultivated, and encouraged,” wrote NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. 

NRA members and Second Amendment supporters know that just as guns are not a disease, America’s millions of law-abiding gun owners are not at fault for the increase in violent crime. Far from it actually. The more-than-8-million new gun owners in 2020 are not to blame, either, as they’ve simply made a prudent decision to protect themselves during times of unrest.