The FBI has released the 2018 “Crime in the United States” report, which compiles crime data from law enforcement agencies around the country. The news is good, and the positive data proved easy to consume:
“[In 2018] violent crime offenses decreased when compared with estimates from 2017. Robbery offenses fell 12.0 percent, murder and non-negligent manslaughter offenses fell 6.2 percent, and the estimated volume of aggravated assault offenses decreased 0.4 percent.”
According to the report, violent crime rates hit a low in 2014—marking the lowest point since 1970. By comparison, the violent crime rate in 2018 represented the third-lowest rate since 1970. The following chart illustrates the data-proven, decreasing trend of violent crime:
Contrary to mainstream-media reports, the 2018 data reflected the continuation of a violent-crime-rate decline that has persisted for nearly 30 years. In other words, even as the number of firearms exponentially increased and the so-called “assault weapons” ban expired, crime nonetheless declined.
But what about the rifles we hear about from gun-control advocates? Did the report address the use of such firearms? Indeed, it did. Apparently rifles of all types were used in only 2 percent of the homicides for which the FBI received weapons-related data in 2018. This bears repeating: The 2-percent figure covered all types of rifles—including the hunting rifles the Charlottesville’s chief of police advocated banning in her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in September. Perhaps someone should remind Chief Brackney that rifles accounted for fewer homicides than knives (11 percent), hands, fists and feet (5 percent) and blunt objects (3 percent).
Will this objective data mean anything to anti-gun politicians and activists whose arguments have now been scientifically disproved? Will they continue to conflate homicides and suicides into a false narrative of “gun violence?" The only way to find out is to wield the data-proven truth and hold them accountable for their fiction.
When you actually look at the data, the alleged gun “epidemic” is nowhere to be found. The “public-health crisis” fueling every liberal researcher’s pursuit of federal funding is nonexistent. Despite all of their professed fidelity to science, every “progressive” politician and billionaire puppeteer ignores the scientific data proving the decrease in violent crime. Why is this? Why does their agenda require false fear instead of freedom?
Number Of Concealed Carry Permit Holders Increased Again In 2019
In early October, economist John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center released “Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2019,” his annual report on the number of concealed-carry permit holders in the United States.
We’ll let Lott’s summary deliver the key finding:
“In 2019, the number of concealed handgun permits soared to now over 18.66 million—a 304 percent increase since 2007. About an 8 percent growth over the number of permits since 2018.”
Let that sink in. More than 18.66 million Americans hold a permit to lawfully carry a concealed firearm to protect themselves and their loved ones. That number does not include the increasing number of states that do not require a permit to legally carry a firearm.
While 7.3 percent of American adults hold a concealed-carry permit, it is by no means a homogenous group. Some states provide permit-holder data by gender and race. “Among those states, women averaged 26.5 percent of permit holders—a half of one percentage point increase over 2018.” The increase in female permit holders outpaced the increase in male permit holders across the same time period—and the number of African American permit holders increased faster than the number of white permit holders. Lott reports that, in Texas, the number of black permit holders has grown more than twice as quickly as the number of white permit holders. Within states that provide data by both gender and race, black female permit holders were the fastest growing population. In fact, as Lott reports, “The rates of permit holding among American Indian, Asian, black and white females all grew much faster than the rates for males in those racial groups.”
Besides being an increasingly diverse group, permit holders continue to prove they are law-abiding citizens. Lott presents permit revocation rates to demonstrate. The highest-revocation rate listed is 0.72 percent in Connecticut; only one other state (Maryland) is even above 0.5 percent. To be clear, that is less than 1 percent of permit holders and, as Lott notes, “Most of these rates include revocations for any reason, including people moving out of the state, and for the states where the revocation rates are higher than hundredths of a percentage point are due to residency revocations.”
These findings should reinforce the fact that law-abiding gun owners are not criminals and should not be the targets of efforts to reduce crime. As we have seen time and again, focusing on the actual criminals yields results. Efforts to demonize law-abiding gun owners will only increase as politicians get desperate for attention from a fawning media. They will ignore that crime rates have fallen, that the number of permit holders has increased and that criminals don’t follow laws. Sounds like common sense.
Don’t anti-gun politicians all believe in common sense?
