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Gun Rights Hater and Gun Banner Bloomberg Fails to Admit the Obvious

National Rifle Association

New York, NY - -(AmmoLand.com)- Skilled marksmen know that parallax—caused by having your head in the wrong place when looking through your sights—can cause you to miss your target.

As New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated yet again, having your head in the wrong place can also result in a miss where gun control is concerned.

Bloomberg’s group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has produced a 51-page “Blueprint for Federal Action” calling for seven federal departments and agencies—the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security, the FBI and BATFE, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and the White House Office of Management and Budget—to implement 40 changes to federal gun law interpretation and enforcement. The manifesto doesn’t state what its recommendations are intended to accomplish. However, knowing that Bloomberg believes “More Guns Means More Crime,” we can safely assume that he intends to reduce gun sales.

Enter the problem of parallax.
Within the last few weeks, the FBI has reported two sets of data that are not in dispute, both of which challenge Bloomberg’s presumptions. First, murders dropped more than 10 percent in 2009, extending to approximately 51 percent the steady decrease in the nation’s per capita murder rate since 1991. Second, since the November 1998 inception of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS, supported by the NRA and opposed by the Brady Campaign), the system has approved over 109 million firearm-related queries. The 10 percent drop in murder between 2008 and 2009 coincided with a 14 percent increase in NICS checks, and annual NICS checks have increased by 62 percent since the expiration of the federal “assault weapon” ban.

A normal person taking these facts into account would conclude that restrictions on gun sales are not what cause crime to decrease. After all, the nation’s murder rate has fallen to a 45-year low, while gun control restrictions have been mostly on the wane, and the number of privately-owned guns in the U.S. has risen to an all-time high, growing by over 4 million every year.

But Bloomberg isn’t seeing it that way. The mayors’ “blueprint,” includes calls for expanding the variety of firearms banned under the Gun Control Act’s “sporting purposes” test, requiring “REAL ID”-compliant identification for all gun purchases, requiring dealers to notify BATFE when transferring multiple handguns to their personal collections, maintaining certain NICS records for longer than the 24 hours currently allowed, conducting criminal enforcement operations against gun shows rather than against individual dealers suspected of violating the law, suppressing sales of firearms by private parties at gun shows, providing BATFE an additional $53 million to conduct FFL audits, requiring dealers to maintain records of trace requests, expanding BATFE firearm tracing operations, funding additional gun control research, and empowering the CPSC to regulate the manufacture of gun locks.

Fortunately, Bloomberg’s latest effort has been mostly ignored by legislators and the media. (Indeed, it was never publicly released, and only divulged in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.)

But it serves as a clear reminder that gun control supporters, who claim the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller gives a green light to all gun control other than a total ban, intend to make it as difficult as possible for lawful citizen to buy, sell and possess guns in general. And by promoting these initiatives to regulatory agencies, they want to achieve their real goal—undermining the Second Amendment—without bothering to get any new laws passed by a Congress that might not go along with their scheme.

About:
Established in 1871, the National Rifle Association is America’s oldest civil rights and sportsmen’s group. Four million members strong, NRA continues its mission to uphold Second Amendment rights and to advocate enforcement of existing laws against violent offenders to reduce crime. The Association remains the nation’s leader in firearm education and training for law-abiding gun owners, law enforcement and the military. Visit: www.nra.org

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Murder Down Gun Sales Up – Proof That Guns Don’t Cause Crime

Second Amendment Foundation

BELLEVUE, WA – -(AmmoLand.com)- A ten percent drop in murders during the first six months of this year at a time when gun sales were up dramatically is more proof that there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, the Second Amendment Foundation said today.

The FBI released data Monday that shows murders dropped by 10 percent from the same period in 2008. Meanwhile, according to data released by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) shows that during the first six months of this year, gun sales were up. January 2009 background checks rose 28.8 percent over the same month in 2008, February’s NICS checks were up 23.3 percent and in March they were up 29.9 percent over March 2008. The trend continued in April, with NICS checks up 30.3 percent, while May showed a slowdown, up only 15.5 percent, and in June they were up 18.1 percent.

“What this shows,” said SAF Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb, “is that gun prohibitionists are all wrong when they argue that more guns result in more crime. Firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens are no threat to anyone. Perhaps violent criminals were actually discouraged by all of those gun sales earlier this year, because the media made a point of reporting the booming gun market.

“Anti-gunners,” he continued, “have lost another one of their baseless arguments. Millions of Americans bought guns during the first six months of this year, many of them for the first time. Yet with all of those new guns in circulation, coupled with an increased demand for concealed carry licenses around the country, the streets have not been awash in blood, as gun banners repeatedly predict.

“Hard facts trump hot air,” Gottlieb concluded. “These people are consistently wrong about our rights. Millions of people bought guns, especially semiautomatic sport-utility rifles that gun grabbers want to ban because they say people aren’t safe with all of those guns in private hands. Well, the people disagree, and so does the data.”

The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nations 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 650,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control. SAF has previously funded successful firearms-related suits against the cities of Los Angeles; New Haven, CT; and San Francisco on behalf of American gun owners, a lawsuit against the cities suing gun makers and an amicus brief and fund for the Emerson case holding the Second Amendment as an individual right.

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