GUNs / Both the pro-gun and anti-gun lobbies are out of control.
Yes, guns can be scary … and so can cable TV which runs the same sad stories over and over and over and over.
The FBI says that rifles of ANY kind accounted for less than 400 deaths last year out of 10,000 violent deaths.
What problem are we trying to solve?
The best source on this debate is the FBI, which provides an annual crime report that also provides history so that you can compare crime rates by category and across time.
3.8% deaths per 100,000 due to violence in 2012 (preliminary number; final number to be released in Jun 2013) is the current estimate of whether the use of guns to commit violence is on the rise or the fall. 3.8% @100,000 is itself a major improvement over 2011′s 4.6%.
The rate in 2006 was 5.8% and in 1996 it was 7.4%
In the end, the anti-gun lobby will lose because they are trying to solve the wrong problem, assuming they are focused on ‘violent crime’ without regard to the implement of death that is used. Assault Guns are just a boogeyman that plays in well with a theme of gun control, regardless of their actual use in our society.
The pro-gun lobby will come out of this looking like a bunch of tone deaf nuts because they seem incapable of empathy at a time when appearing to actually care would be one of the best things they could do to deflect near hysterics by the anti-gun crowd … assuming that they do care — which can be in doubt when they go out of their way to block almost any form of research into how guns are used and all the while claiming that what we need to do is to examine the facts.
Source: FBI Annual Crime Rate Statistics
