After decades of decline, violent crime in several large American cities is flaring up. You see it on the news, it seems, more every night: Sirens wail as shootings, murders, riots, looting, arsons and chaos explode with a fury not seen in years.
This might well be an anomaly. Leading criminologists believe violent crime nationwide continues to decline overall. They say the violence we’re seeing in scattered cities is isolated, non-representative and contrary to the downward national trend. In short, the statistics are misleading because the sample sizes are so small.
The bad news is that gun-ban politicians are exploiting these localized flare-ups of violent crime, and cherry-picking statistics to paint a false picture of reality and push more anti-gun laws.
What’s ironic is that those laws will further disarm the most vulnerable among us—honest citizens abandoned by politicians who refuse to protect us from violent criminals (see sidebar story) yet won’t allow us to protect ourselves.
And the media—with their hype and hysteria—are helping those politicians every night and every day.
Just look at the headlines:
- Baltimore sees its deadliest month since 1972, as murders double to 42 in May alone.
- Chicago shootings exceed 1,000 in the first six months of 2015.
- New York City murders rise by 20 percent.
- Atlanta homicides rise by 32 percent.
- Houston murders almost double in the first quarter of 2015.
- Milwaukee homicides rise by 180 percent.
Nationwide, violent crime has been decreasing for 20 years straight. According to FBI statistics, the national murder rate today is lower than it has been in 50 years, and the overall violent crime rate is lower than it’s been in 40 years.
It takes nearly a year for the FBI to compile and release statistics. So it’s too early to tell whether the rising violence we see in some cities today points to a larger overall trend.
But one thing is sure: Cynical anti-gun politicians are using recent spikes in violent crime in isolated cities to try to impose new anti-gun laws upon all of us.
When asked about the deadly riots in Baltimore this spring, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, “Obviously there’s some common-sense things we could do—certainly passage of some gun-safety laws in Congress that could keep guns out of the hands of criminals would be one thing that we could do to try to limit the violence.”
In other words, the White House tries to justify new gun bans by pointing to Baltimore—when Maryland already has some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the United States!
President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—who now presides as mayor over the long-disarmed but lawless city of Chicago, where more than 1,000 were shot in the first half of this year—also said that more gun control was the answer. President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—who now presides as mayor over the long-disarmed but lawless city of Chicago, where more than 1,000 were shot in the first half of this year—also said that more gun control was the answer.
“To get the gains we need,” Emanuel said, “you need to change the gun laws. Which means Springfield [the state capital] has to step up.”
Yet Illinois, and particularly Chicago, already have some of the strictest anti-gun laws and outright bans in the U.S.!
As Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel counseled, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” because “it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
In addition, several new gun-ban bills have been introduced in Congress.
In her so-called Firearm Risk Protection Act, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., proposed requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance to exercise their Second Amendment-protected rights. But considering that one of the largest corporate donors to Maloney’s political campaigns has been the insurance industry, maybe a more appropriate title for her legislation would be the “Campaign Cash Protection Act.”
Together with U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Maloney also introduced legislation that would give $60 million of your tax dollars to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to conduct so-called “research” to prop up anti-gun propaganda.
Additionally, Douglas Schoen, a pollster who worked for the Clinton White House in the 1990s, is now advising Hillary Clinton to push gun control as part of her presidential bid. “Hillary’s legislative record and decades of advocacy,” Schoen wrote, “are in step with a majority of Americans.”
And as The Hill reported: “Gun control advocates have high hopes for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, viewing her as an ally who can finish the push” started by Obama on gun control.
So while it may take a few years for enough statistics to come in to determine whether or not there is a new violent crime wave, all Americans—urban and rural—have much to lose if politicians continue to refuse to allow us to protect ourselves from the criminals they refuse to control.
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said law-abiding Americans, regardless of where they live, must be able to defend themselves and their loved ones via their Second Amendment liberties.
“Americans—both urban and rural—who care about their freedom and their safety need to take a stand with the NRA to protect their ability to defend themselves,” LaPierre said.
