Democrat Policies Lead to Widespread Violence in Washington DC :: 08/14/2023

Murders in Washington DC are soaring. The murderers usually use guns, yet DC is has some of the most extensive gun-control regulations of any city. How can this possibly be?

The Democrat party ruled DC for the last six decades. There are high paying jobs in the city. There is a social safety net, yet the murder rate is going through the roof. Lately, DC’s murderers have been killing about two people a night and wounding many more. The 161 people murdered so far this year is a 20 percent increase from year to year. That doesn’t seem possible given the laws in place.

According to the Gifford’s gun-control advocacy group, Washington DC is one of the most stringently gun-controlled places in the entire nation. Here are some, but only a small fraction, of Washington DC’s numerous gun-control laws.

Licensing and background checks of each legal gun owner
Universal background checks before any legal firearms sale
Licensing of each legal handgun dealer
Removal of a legal gun owner’s firearms without the owner appearing in court
Prohibition on legal firearms possession after charges of domestic violence
Prohibition on legal ownership of many contemporary firearms
Legal restrictions on magazine capacity
Mandatory waiting periods before taking possession of a firearm after passing a background check
Mandatory firearms storage laws
Restrictions on the open carry of a firearm
Restrictive concealed carry laws for legal gun owners with many “gun-free” zones

We know that drug gangs are violent. We know that refusing to arrest and jail criminals leads to more crime. That said, what if DC is doing it wrong? What if DC has an oversupply of easy victims in addition to an oversupply of violent criminals? In simplest terms, DC’s gun-control makes it enormously harder for honest people to defend themselves at home and in public. If the victims of violent crime are routinely disarmed, then it hardly matters what particular weapons the criminals are carrying.

If I’m disarmed, I don’t care if the robber has 8 cartridges in his gun, or 20 in his gun.
I still have to put my hands up and hand over my wallet and phone.

We know that DC’s gun-control regulations impose severe taxes of time and money that many DC residents can’t pay. It is hard to compare statistics for all legal gun owners in DC. We know that the rate of concealed carry in DC (1.3%) is only a fraction of the rate we see across the US (7%). The rate of legal firearms ownership in DC is similarly reduced. That confirms the idea that DC citizens are easy victims for violent criminals.

Gun-control politicians told us that guns cause crime, but it takes only a vanishingly small number of firearms for criminals to commit a large number of violent crimes. What if disarmed victims lead to increased crime too?

Rather than search for a theory, we can look at actual practice. We don’t see murder rates like DC’s in Naples Florida. We don’t see murder rates like this in Portland, Maine. Neither of those cities have DC style gun laws.

I think this problem was proposed, voted for, and approved right in DC. Gun-control is the cause, not the solution to violent crime in DC.

https://slowfacts.wordpress.com/2023/08/10/democrat-policies-lead-to-widespread-violence-in-washington-dc/