By Rob Morse
Gun-control advocates will tell you that the 23,000 firearms regulations we have today aren’t nearly enough. Those laws are simply a good start. In contrast, advocates of armed self defense will tell you that the right to bear arms is horribly infringed. Both are telling the truth about what they want, but they can’t both be right. In fact the results are shockingly different. Imperfect gun control fails time after time while imperfect armed defense stops millions of violent crimes each year. The truth is obvious if we’re willing to look.
There were over 278,000 cases of criminals using guns during the commission of a violent crime in 2019, the last year for which the FBI provides complete statistics. We also had 61 mass murders with a firearm in 2021. All of these crimes were committed by a criminal who shouldn’t have had a gun.
Criminals get firearms not because there are too few laws, but because criminals ignore the laws we already have. And always will. The mountain of laws on the books that regulate the manufacture, distribution, sale, and ownership of guns in this country failed to stop those violent criminals.
Every violent criminal who used a gun probably broke several gun-control laws during the commission of their crime. To start, these criminals stole a gun or bought it illegally. In addition to acquiring it, their possession of a gun was also illegal. They likely broke the law when they transported their firearm and when they carried it. Likewise, there are laws against criminals possessing or transporting ammunition. Concealing their firearm in public was against the law too.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. Gun control laws actually made the job of mass-murderers easier and made their attacks more deadly. These criminals deliberately attacked us in “gun-free” zones where honest citizens are disarmed by law.
Violent criminals who commit robbery, rape, assault, murder, or even mass murder are more than willing to break our firearms laws. These criminals commit many crimes before they are caught by law enforcement. That means violent criminals violate our gun control laws several million times every year. Does that surprise anyone?
Gun control has failed to stop violent criminals several million times yet gun control advocates want us to pass more of their failing laws. Insanity is doing the same thing time after time and expecting a different result the next time you try the same old thing. That’s why I think gun control is crazy.
I’m as repulsed by violent crime and mass murder as you are, and fortunately, we have options that work.
Owning a gun and using it for defense is common. Over 80 million of us own guns. Forty-one percent of us live in a household that has firearms. About one-in-a-dozen adults are armed in public. Thirty percent of gun owners have used their firearm for defense.
Honest citizens use their personal firearms for self defense about more than 1.6 million times every year. That is a lot of armed self defense and a wonderful legacy of lives that were saved.
As a conservative estimate, these armed citizens saved about 5 million victims from criminal violence. They save those lives despite the thousands of infringements on honest citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms.
We know a lot about the armed citizens who have their permits to carry a firearm in public. These 20 million citizens are extraordinarily law-abiding and non-violent. They are less likely to break the law than the police. Ordinary gun owners are also less likely than the police to have an accident or shoot the wrong person.
When we look at their record in the last few years, these honest gun owners stopped attempted mass murder about half the time where they were allowed to go armed. That has stopped 104 attempted mass murders in the last seven years. That explains why mass-murderers choose “gun-free” zones.
The future is uncertain, but we know some things with confidence. We know that anti-gun politicians will continue to offer their same broken “solutions” for violent crime. We also know that ordinary citizens will be at the scene of those crimes every time. We know that gun control will fail and that armed citizens will stop violent criminals millions of times a year.
Does it make more sense for our neighbors to be disarmed victims or armed defenders? That choice is up to us. In fact, the choice is up to you.
This article was originally published at Slow Facts and is reprinted here with permission.
