On Monday, Milwaukee Mayor (and founding member of Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns) Tom Barrett called a press conference to blame the city’s growing homicide rate on the state Assembly and Gov. Scott Walker, who signed concealed carry into law. Despite Barrett’s claims that the uptick is a result of “more guns on the streets,” Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke knows better.
In an interview with WND, Clarke pointed out that while murders this year are double what they were this time last year, last year’s murder rate was down 14 percent from 2013. As Clarke pointed out, Barrett never mentioned the possibility that last year’s decrease was due to a rising number of guns on the streets. But with murders in the city peaking at 163 in 1991 and dropping steadily ever since—while gun ownership has continued to grow—it’s easy to see Barrett’s claims are mere sleight of hand. “Neither one of them [Barrett or Police Chief Ed Flynn] have a strategy to reduce crime, by the way,” Sheriff Clarke said. “So gun control [is] a convenient straw man they can use.”
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