U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- The FBI released crime data for 2020 last week, using an amalgamation of data collected under two different systems. Nothing about 2020 was predictable and the nation experienced a 5.6% percent increase in violent crime, including a 29.4% increase in murders. Let’s explore this data and the theories behind the increase.
The overall murder rate in 2020 was 6.5 per 100,000 population. This is the highest since the late 1990s when crime in general and murder specifically began a downward trend. It is not, however, near the peaks that the nation suffered not that long ago. The 2020 murder rate of 6.5 per 100k is lower than it was at any point during the period 1968 through 1997. From 1971 through 1995, the murder rate twice dipped below 8.0 per 100k population – in 1984 through 1985, when it was more than 7.9 per 100k.
Several factors can and should be, considered relevant to the violent increase in 2020. Certainly, we as a society lived through unprecedented – and ever-changing – conditions, including economic stressors known to be related to violent crime. Changing law enforcement strategies throughout the country, whether referred to as “de-policing” or something else, should be considered relevant.
Unsurprisingly, anti-gun radicals have been blaming the increase in gun sales since well before there was blame to assign. This will undoubtedly persist, even though avowed anti-gun policy researcher Doctor Garen Wintemute of UC Davis found no association between so-called “excess purchases” of firearms and non-domestic violence. The association between the alleged “excess purchases” and domestic violence were quite subject to model specification. We covered this research in a July 2021 alert. We noted, at that time, that Daniel Webster, the Bloomberg Chair at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and Director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, tried to put some positive gun control spin on the findings.
Webster is at least open to the possibility (read: reality) that law-abiding gun owners are not the problem. He told the Washington Post that, “it was too early to tie the jump in gun sales to new owners to the rise in shooting deaths.” He then mentioned pandemic-related personnel shortages at law enforcement agencies and new rules or strategies that limited pro-active policing.
That theory makes sense – much more sense than the concept of a sudden increase in criminals obtaining guns from federally licensed dealers and undergoing a background check (which is what transactions reported in NICS require). After all, we know where criminals get their guns and it’s on the black market.
Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, offered his thoughts on the increase in crime last year. Abt told Time Magazine that, “there is not a new form of violence out there that emerged during the pandemic. It’s an intensification of the violence among these small groups of people in places that it was already happening.”
Imagine that. Criminals escalating their behavior in the absence of a deterrent. This echoes the concerns that an increasingly diverse array of millions of Americans expressed during 2020 by making the choice to acquire a firearm to protect themselves and their loved ones.
About NRA-ILA:
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Visit: www.nra.org
Getting rid of the police would make it really hard to enforce gun control laws. And Red Flag laws. And Civil Forfeiture laws.
But let’s keep supporting them cuz we’re afraid of criminals despite our 468 million guns.
Exactly!
When people are forced to police their communities for themselves things get ugly. This is lost on the Progressive New Left. They have no concept of how to actually govern and maintain individual liberty at the same time. That is why Blue America is falling apart.
As gun bans & vax tyranny progress, people are going to wish they policed their communities for themselves.
The Ieft is not about “governing” nor do they care for individuaI Iiberty. They are about controI, destruction, and restriction of Iiberty.
No, when people police their own communities, that’s when the problems get solved. You may consider that as ugly, but I disagree.
This article is a perfect example of attribution error and the intentional obfuscation of correlation and causality. It’s intellectually dishonest at a minimum, and most likely completely propagandized bullshit. There is no numerical evidence that cops prevent crime. The places with the most cops also tend to have the most crime. See how false causation attribution works? The best example of this is prison. How many violent crimes are committed in prisons? How many contraband and smuggling crimes are committed in prisons? How many enforcers per non-enforcer in prisons? How much surveillance in prisons? I’m so tired of these ridiculous… Read more »
Try telling that to “police first” LEAA-NRA and “Libertarians” like John Lott.
Very true. I do believe that some police from decades ago did know the bad guys from the good guys. Now they treat you like roger stone.
Or this poor guy: https://saveourfarmva.com/
Read his story of being dragged out of his house at gunpoint thru the grass by the so called swat team. Doesn’t make you want to back the gestapo involved here
You’ve got some sort of proof for all this? Less police seems to lead to more crime, at least in the Left Coast.
Not if “less police” is offset by more armed civilians. Cross-sectional comparison: D locales have high crime & high ratios of cops to armed civilians. R states have low crime, low ratio of cops to armed civilians.
Recent time series is misleading: D states-cities don’t offset defunding with armed-trained-indemnified civilians. Quite the contrary.
Also, federal police commit a huge amount of crime. Fewer federales = less crime. More federales = more crime.
It’s because “less police” isn’t offset by more armed civilians. The mistake of displacing civilian mutual defense with paid cops yielded a vast crime hike. The reverse would be true again.
What’s NRA doing to block cutting the transaction threshold to $600 so IRS can snoop accounts for gun-ammo buys & harass gun owners? Evidently in the “infrastructure” bill.