I continue to cheer on my birth state from the
sidelines as the Republicans dismantle liberalism brick by brick. North Carolina has a Republican governor and
a Republican state legislature and state senate. So far they have taken aim at the state
income tax, implementing a flat tax rather than a tiered tax that punished
people the more they earned. They ended
teacher tenure in public schools that had historically protected teachers just
because they had been on the job longer.
They instituted voter ID which will make elections more honest, despite
the insane contention from the left that it will keep minorities from voting.
But a little-noticed law goes into effect this
week. It prohibits law enforcement from
destroying unclaimed firearms and guns acquired through one of those silly gun
buy-back programs. Now they’re required
to either donate the guns, keep them or sell them to licensed firearms dealers
unless the guns are damaged or missing serial numbers. Heretofore, law enforcement agencies would destroy
millions of dollars worth of guns under the guise of keeping the streets
safer. Of course, anyone who has studied
the issue knows that it’s not the guns.
Even a new Harvard University study concluded that
more guns do not mean more violence. The
study looked at gun ownership worldwide and found that America’s relatively
high murder rate along with its relatively high gun ownership rate was an
anomaly. For example, Luxembourg bans
handguns but their murder rate is nine times higher than Germany’s where gun
ownership is 30,000 times higher. The
Soviet Union managed to strip its citizenry of their guns which continued after
the Iron Curtain fell. By the 1990s
their murder rate was three times that of the United States despite their ban
on guns.
In fact, the Harvard study found more guns equated
to less crime. Here’s the money quote
from the study: “Where firearms are most dense
violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime
rates are highest.”
Of course, that’s common sense for
those of us who understand why the founding fathers included the Second
Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
What’s ironic is President Obama
signed 23 Executive Actions in the wake of the Newtown, CT shooting and one was
a study from the CDC to research the causes and prevention of gun
violence. In the process they blew out
of the water many of the preconceived notions of the gun grabbers.
One thing the CDC study found was “unintentional
firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century.” They concluded that less than one percent of
all unintentional fatalities today are due to firearms. So much for the old “having a gun in the
house is dangerous” argument.
The president’s own commissioned study
also found that guns are used far more for defensive purposes than for
murder. “Defensive use of guns by crime
victims is a common occurrence,” they concluded. “Almost
all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are
at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual
uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context
of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.” How much press did the study get? Virtually none.
In North Carolina they understand that
simply destroying guns does not solve anything.
Guns turned into a buy-back program are guns that would never have been
used in a crime. The so-called “gun
culture” is not the problem. It’s the
“thug culture” that’s the problem. Until
we address that, senseless killings will continue.
No comments:
Post a Comment