A report published by MSNBC.com confirms “everything gun rights groups have been saying for years, that more armed citizens does not equate to increased violence, and actually coincides with a reduction in homicides,” the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
The on-line news agency this morning released an investigative report that record numbers of American citizens are now legally carrying firearms for personal protection. Yet, the report also reveals that homicide rates have declined dramatically during a period when gun sales have skyrocketed. Further, the report noted that Washington, DC with its extreme gun control has the highest murder rate in the nation, while Utah, with very liberal gun laws, has the lowest rate.
“This is further evidence that everything the gun prohibitionists have been claiming and predicting over the past two decades has been fundamentally fraudulent,” said SAF Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “They have repeatedly argued that more guns will equate to more crime and more firearms deaths, and MSNBC.com just let the air out of their sails with this exhaustive and well-balanced report.”
Gottlieb said the public “has gradually, but steadily come to the realization that the gun ban lobby has built its campaign of citizen disarmament on a mountain of falsehoods, one heaped on top of another.”
“This is why,” he said, “anti-gun groups have lost their momentum and their credibility. They failed to gain traction even with a Democrat-controlled Congress and an anti-gun White House. They are so desperate for attention that they have now declared war on private businesses just to generate publicity. Their high-profile campaign of hysteria against Starbucks for complying with state laws that allow concealed and open carry in their coffee shops is based on an issue they fabricated just to grab headlines and television face time, and the public knows it.
The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.-MSNBC.com
“Every restrictive gun law, every ban, every gun-free-zone they have advocated and defended have one thing in common,” Gottlieb concluded. “They gave us a body count. The MSNBC.com report suggests America has had enough.”
The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group focusing on the Constitutional right and heritage to privately own and possess firearms. Founded in 1974, The Foundation has grown to more than 600,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control.