It’s no surprise that California has thrown everything – including the kitchen sink – into the gun control heap, so some wonder is there really more the anti-gunners can do?
Of course there is! When truth, technology and common
The Left treats facts and reason – especially when it comes to guns – as if they were annoying flies on a warm summer night – something to be swatted away. It doesn’t matter that a new academic study has found that, once again, gun laws are not having their desired effect. Bearing Arms reported this week that “A joint study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of California at Davis Violence Prevention Research Program found that California’s much-touted mandated background checks had no impact on gun deaths, and researchers are puzzled as to why.”
The researchers may be surprised but GOC surely isn’t.
California’s expansive background checks for firearm sales have been around since 1991. The legislation mandated that all such sales had to go through a California-licensed Federal Firearms License (FFL) dealer. Ultimately, all firearm sales and transfers became subject to a 15-day waiting period (now 10-day) to make certain all gun purchasers had undergone a thorough background check.
But, according to Bearing Arms, “More than a quarter of a century later, researchers at Johns Hopkins and UC Davis dug into the results of the sweeping legislation. Researchers compared yearly gun suicide and homicide rates over the 10 years following implementation of California’s law with 32 control states that did not have such laws.
They found “no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.”
Even though the results differ from research in Missouri and Connecticut that did show a link, could it be, as Bearing Arms aptly points out that “violent crime is a complex issue and gun control proposals are a simplistic answer. The roots of violence often run deep, as do the paths of weapons toward criminal hands. When we see studies that suggest gun control had one effect or another, what we’re looking at is a corollary. This happened and, at the same time, that happened. ‘After, therefore because of.’ This is a logical fallacy that, frankly, we all fall victim to.”
And then there’s that new report that violent crime dropped by 48.6% in the U.S. in the same period that saw the record number of arms purchases: 423 million firearms, and 8.1 billion rounds of ammunition according to recently released data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. I repeat: 423 million firearms, and 8.1 billion rounds of ammunition!
WHOA NELLIE! How can that be? The media has been hollering that Americans have no appetite for anything gun related – people are terrified!!
Talk about an inconvenient fact that has gone largely unreported.
Joe Bertozzi, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, recently told American Military News “These figures show that the United States has a strong desire to continue buying firearms for lawful purposes.” He also said “The continued popularity of guns demonstrates that Americans have a keen interest in protecting themselves and their homes.”
This is clear, given that an overwhelming 25 million people registered in 2019 to carry guns in the US.
Members of the California legislature and the Democrat presidential candidates aren’t paying attention. They want to make this the year for gun control. With Joe Biden criticizing a Texas law as “irrational” for allowing church-goers to be armed and Michael Bloomberg telling folks in Alabama that “You just do not want the average American carrying a gun in a crowded place,” we have our work cut out for us.
It’s a good thing we are ready to battle.