U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- The gun control lobby started it. Then the legacy media joined in and told us that guns and gun owners were dangerous. Their solution is to register and regulate guns and gun owners. They claim their gun control will somehow, someday, take the guns out of the hands of criminals. If you only read the words then you might be persuaded. Let’s fill in the facts the gun prohibitionists always leave out. Gun control laws do more harm than good.
Honest gun owners use a firearm to stop a violent crime about 1.7 million times a year, a little over 45-hundred defensive-guns-uses a day.
That massive benefit overshadows all the other problems we have with the criminal use of firearms. Legally justified armed defense is dozens of times more frequent than the suicides and accidents we see with firearms. It is hard to overestimate the importance of armed defense. Disarming honest gun owners in the hope of disarming criminals is a disaster since guns do so much good.
Guns are common and persistent. Estimates put it just under 400 million firearms legally owned by over 80 million adults in the US. I have guns that are decades old. My friends have guns that are older than a century. Guns do not go away with time.
Criminals have lots of guns too. Criminals stole over 13 thousand guns from gun stores last year.
One number I saw said that about 300 thousand guns were stolen from homes and cars each year. That works out to one gun stolen out of each 1300 guns we own so I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. Before you think we can stop criminals from getting guns, consider that the Mexican army lost a third of the guns it bought from the US military and US manufacturers. That dwarfs the 3 thousand guns the Obama administration sold to Mexican drug lords. The Mexican military also lost guns it bought from Germany, Australia, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Belgium. That is where the drug lords get the guns they use in Mexico.. and in the USA.
The marketplace for guns and ammunition is worldwide. Most countries have domestic firearms manufacturers. That means new sources of guns are only a few days away.
Guns and ammunition are easy to make. My friends reload ammunition for fun. It is a growing sport to make your own guns. Getting a few gun parts is easy for the drug gangs in our inner cities. Compared to transporting millions of illegal aliens and billions of dollars of drugs across the border each year, moving a few ounces of steel and plastic is simple. If you can make private submarines to transport drugs, then the drug organizations can make all the guns they want. That means we’re not going to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
Keep in mind that only about 8 percent of violent crimes are committed with a firearm. Disarming violent criminals won’t stop the 92 percent of the violent crimes that are committed without a gun.
Gun ownership is widespread, but violence is localized. The good news is that most counties won’t see a single murder this year. About half of all murders happen in just two percent of our counties. Despite the localized problems of drug gangs, anti-gun activists and some politicians want to pass more gun laws for all of us. I wish it were that easy to make the world better.
In reality, regulations have to be exquisitely tailored so they do more good than harm. For example, we could ask for a mental health exam before we bought a gun in the hope of reducing suicide. If we eliminated all suicides with a gun, but also reduce the number of defensive gun uses by just 1.4 percent (1-in-70), then we’ve cost lives rather than saved them.
We looked, and sadly we never saw gun control reduce the number of suicides. We forget that delaying a gun purchase also means that more victims of domestic abuse faced their attackers unarmed.
We could demand that all guns be locked up in the hope of eliminating firearm accidents. If we decreased the number of armed defenders who reach their guns in time by only 0.03 percent (1-in-3500), then we’ve actually cost more lives rather than saved them. Imagine that the elderly woman living alone struggles to open her gun safe late at night and becomes a victim rather than a defender. We already balance risks and benefits for our family.
You can’t fix a small problem by creating a larger one.
It is easy to forget that we have over 23-thousand firearms regulations today. Criminals are no more likely to follow new rules than they were to follow the old ones. We already lock up our guns to keep them safe. We’re wonderfully reluctant to shoot an intruder. Because armed defense is so common, it is insanely hard for gun regulations to do more good than they do harm.
The sad news is that we have too much gun control already. We have more assaults, robberies, rapes, and murders because the victims were disarmed by our gun laws. Mandatory waiting periods cost lives because they disarm the victims, not the criminals. The cold truth is we’d save more lives if we reduced the fees and the number of classroom hours required for honest gun owners to get their carry permits.
About Rob Morse
The original article, with sources, is posted here. Rob Morse writes about gun rights at Ammoland, at Clash Daily, at Second Call Defense, and on his SlowFacts blog. He hosts the Self Defense Gun Stories Podcast and co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. Rob was an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.
Very good article with supporting facts. However, it presumes gun laws are written to reduce crime. They are not. Gun control is designed for people control, and the laws are passed to exert and increase power of the government, and to relegate citizens into being defenseless victims, and no threat to corrupt governments that violate their rights. Governments want compliant, dependent populations that do as they are told and do not talk back, resist, disagree with or prevent governments’ agendas.
I find it deeply troubling that Canada will roll out the storm troopers on April 30, 2022 to enforce Justdumb Trudeau’s ‘assault’ gun ban across Canada. I like to think CA was populated by a more common sense populace. The on going governmental crack down on free speech, free religion, and Chinese virus lock downs and mandates should be a harbinger of what is to come.
Don’t forget that Canada has a “long gun” registration requirement, how convenient.
Who knows? Maybe when he rolls them out they will be dealt with as the traitors to freedom they are. Just like the enforcers of King George’s edicts were treated at Concord Green. Maybe they will have to decide between a paycheck and going home in one piece.
There are probably some Canadians who think the enforcers will “just be following orders” and “are simply tools in the hands of the real problem” and therefore, because they aren’t acting independently, they shouldn’t be held culpable. We have such people in the United States and they are enabling future enforcement of unconscionable laws.
Canadians should be making it clear to the armed governent employees (who they greatly outnumber) that if they enforce these laws they will be outcasts of society and they and their families will be completely ostracized.
The redcoats are offended.
Who’s enforcing that law, Agent? Lucky Pierre Trudeau? Or police?
You’re not supposed to talk about that – the preferred phrasing is “the governmental crackdown.”
Yep. Lucky Pierre’s going to knock on doors & take guns. My bad.
And who promulgated the law?
Also, I would make a small change to the last sentence: the cold hard truth is that we would save more lives if every state practiced the law of the land, Constitutional Carry, and if every adult who wanted one had a firearm.
Permits are unconstitutional infringements on the right to carry. No free man needs permission to exercise a right he is entitled to by birth. Smart people will seek out training, but no one has the right to say what training is required, best, and best for them. Dangerous liberty trumps peaceful slavery. Every time.
#AllArmsLawsAreUnconstitutional
Facts are meaningless to the left. Gun control is just another spoke in the wheel of left wing communist take over of the USA. The goal is to fully erode our rights, teach children to hate the USA and embrace gender ambiguity, create a powerful federal law enforcement presence that serves at the will of a Marxist dictatorship cloaked in equality and equity, Keep the country divided by race and fake genders, remove all firearms, replace military and local law enforcement with progressive left wing servants who fall in line with Ghestapo philosophy! The Democrat party is the new Nazi… Read more »
And never forget that the Republican polis keep referring to the Democrats polis as “my friends across the aisle”
facts and data are annoying things for leftists. like gravity you don’t have to understand it, but it still happens.
Can anyone imagine what the percentage of crime would be if they disarmed all of society ? Criminals would run rampant and that 92% would be 100 % violent crime perpetrated on a unarmed vulnerable society. Then the government could take total control and make violent crime victims out of everyone that is not of the criminal element. Criminals don’t care about the laws the government passes, they only care about a victim rich environment to prey on !
To use shorthand, criminals don’t obey the laws, that’s what makes them criminals.
I judge the law with simple criteria…If I commit this act will there be a victim? if the answer is no, screw the “law” and in the eyes of the psychopathic control freaks “running the government” I’m a criminal. Am I a criminal to YOU?
True. However, many criminals enforce laws.
that would be the sudden increase of home invasions in australia
Thanks, Rob, but all these facts and figures don’t mean scat to the promulgators of gun control. They’re hellbent on imposing restrictions on firearms of all kinds and up to the point where you’ll surrender from sheer exhaustion. It’s all part of the Left’s never ending struggle towards a despotism of the elite. And if you don’t think they’ve already weaseled their way into the Democrat Party and are now in control of it, you haven’t been watching America for the last forty odd years. I don’t mean you, Rob.
True, but I am thinking that the promulgators of gun control are not our audience. The uncommitted are our audience. Knowledge of the facts and stats give us a resounding response when we get sucked into an exchange with those people in front of our proper audience.
One of the strategies of the Left is not to engage or debate with “extremists” like us. They are our “moral betters”, so engaging with us is beneath them. Of course, the real reason, behind this, they can’t debate against the truth.
“The best slave, is the one who believes he is free.”
None are more hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free…
Seems like the free masons on here don’t like your comments and are voting you down. Most free masons have no idea what the top echelon is involved in.
That 1.7 million figure for “honest” [how is that measured exactly?] gun owners stopping violent crime works out to about 4,657 a day or about 141,000 a month. Why are you never able to find more than a comparative handful every month for your columns? You could just list them in a spreadsheet and pretty much end the debate in this country about the benefits of gun ownership. I’ve tried to find them myself and I get the same paltry results you do. Never more than a few dozen a month. Taking nothing away from truly heroic actions of those… Read more »
i don’t understand why you are so lazy that you don’t even search for the information on the web. so here you are, Firearm Violence Prevention |Violence Prevention|Injury Center|CDC
do you actually think every time a person defends themselves with a firearm they go running to a government agent to tell them?
God gave you a brain, please use it.
There is one major reason why you don’t hear more about these DGUs: no shots were fired in nearly 98% of these cases; merely displaying the firearm is enough to de-escalate the situation. As a result, in most instances the defender never reports the encounter to authorities.
OMG! To think that I have been preoccupied with thinking the economic and military threats the CCP pose was a very real danger. I just knew that eye on my fiat currency was watching my every move. Yessire, it must be all those sneaky Judans plying their subterfuge in conjunction with their tools, i.e. the catholics and bricklayers. I am going to get my 777 forehead tattoo today to protect me. Seriously, there is not one thing the government or anyone else can do to internally change what a person chooses to believe. To whit, the NT and apostolic era… Read more »
Maybe not internally, but the various governments, and their agencies sure are trying to get everyone programed. Everything from TV commercials, years of propaganda in schools up to and including thought control laws (e.g. so called hate crimes statutes).
In 1977, Villanova and Temple Universities studied the phenomenon that even people that knew better could be made to doubt the things that they knew to be correct by repeated exposure to propaganda. The researchers called it the illusory truth effect. Which is kind of a silly name. They should have called it the constantly lied to effect.
Oh, deep sigh, not even God is able to protect me from the government. Oh, dear, all is lost. (wringing hands and weeps tears of bitterness) I KNOW, I WILL BUILD ANOTHER AR, STOCKPILE AMMO, AND PUBLISH INTERNET RANTS, THAT WILL KEEP ME SAFE. When I’m done with the current 6ARC project the next will be a AR308. Oh, thank God, I’m free at last!
I don’t know about that all is lost part, but I like the rest.
ar308 or 6.5 nice long reach remember to have a scope with that
If “God” wanted to protect us, he would destroy every psychopathic control freak administering “government” immediately. Starting with that snake Fauci. So build another AR and stock pile ammo. It makes more sense.
cannon are usefull too
Sure, I understand that might make more sense to you. Personally, I will put my eggs in the “God” basket, Jesus to be more specific. Funny thing is the track record of longevity and fulfillment of prophecy is much greater for my Judaeo-Christian basket than for any of your ‘AR and stockpile ammo’ basket since the dawn of time. Guess what. God isn’t out to ‘protect us’. He is out to save us. Which means our destination in the eternal realm of life that extends far beyond this temporary journey we currently are traveling. He has chosen to leave that… Read more »
The sad thing is concealed carriers like Rob Morse have guns.
Now, Charles, getting by the unnecessary and false insult, if he did not have a gun, how could he be a concealed carrier?
the sad thing is that you have a keyboard and are not afraid to use it.
Most humorous!
Charles you ignorant cuck.
I noticed that you did not disagree with the information Rob presented and considering it is about the use of guns for protection of self and others, are we to assume you find it sad that “Carriers like Rob Morse” use guns to stop criminals or are you just trolling to see what you can stir up?
The sad thing is that your momma didn’t swallow you.
LOL
Please, Charles, so the right thing and come take our guns.