“If Only” Gun Control Fallacy

Some have argued that the reason Chicago has such high gun crime rates even as it has very strict gun laws is that citizens can go outside the city to acquire guns and bring them into the city… But how many gun crimes are being committed by law abiding citizens?

So then the question becomes will making it harder to secure a gun really make much of an impact on criminals. Well if we can secure our borders from criminals and drugs entering this country, it seems highly unlikely that we can do something to prevent illegal guns from entering this country and once here, the guns will largely get distributed to criminals through the “black market”. So it may well be that all strict gun control laws will do is promote another line of business for cartels already shipping drugs and humans into this country.

So at the end of the day, perhaps the real push for gun control is simply because Democrats know it is unlikely to pass and so can serve as a way for them to deflect the poor job many mayors are doing with respect to the crime in their cities.

The three charts below point to a different story… first of all we know as people age they commit fewer violent crimes (first chart) and we know the median age in America has been rising for more than 100 years (2nd chart). We also know the number of firearms has been increasing steadily (red bars on third chart)…

So if access to guns is a predictor of murders they should be trending up, but they are not… instead until the last year they were trending down (green bars on the third chart).

So something happened in the last year that undermined an overall trend of reduced murder. There are two things that make sense… the pandemic or a change in policing and law enforcement. As the pandemic subsides, one of two things should happen… historical downward trends in murder rates should reemerge or if the pandemic is not to blame, then we should be able to see a distinct impact in crime rates in cities that have changed their policing and law enforcement policies…

I wonder how many people will have to die, before Democrats realize that their new woke approaches to policing and law enforcement are deadly and stop deflecting the blame to guns themselves which history does not support.