Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Let me start at the end. I know that I’m doing this wrong. I should try to inflame your emotions with the latest disaster so you’ll give me more clicks as you share this article with your friends. I’m not a mainstream journalist. We can set aside the inflammatory outrage and take a deeper look at the world. I struggle with the same reactions that you do as I read the news. For me, finding a sense of proportion is everything as I take in the news stories. Keeping perspective is intellectually hard because the news media doesn’t give us all the relevant facts. It is also emotionally difficult to know how to react because the media deliberately sells us shock and outrage. We’re left in an uncomfortable position between feeling like we’re being manipulated or feeling that we’re being overly reserved in the face of obvious tragedy. There are other alternatives, but we need to know more than what we read in the headlines.
Nothing gets our attention like the injustice of injured victims. We forget that violence is localized. Most counties in the US won’t have a single murder this year. The worst 5% of our counties accounted for an enormous 73% of our murders. Even then, most of that violence is confined to a few blocks in our failed big cities, and confined a few violent actors in drug gangs.
Sure, we should listen to President Biden when he says there is an “epidemic of gun violence.” Yes, we need to pay close attention to Democrat Governor Terry McCauliffe who said “..we lose 93-million Americans a day to gun violence.” It is critically important to know when we’re being lied to and manipulated, but we can’t sort out the manipulative liars without knowing the facts first.
We forget that mass murder is wonderfully rare. Using the old definition from the FBI, I counted a total of eight mass-murder events in 2022 that claimed a total of 62 victims. That doesn’t mean that the nightly crime in Chicago and Detroit isn’t an outrage. It means that most of us are safer at home and in public than the media would have us believe.
Violence makes the headlines, but stopping mass-murder is buried behind the classified advertisements. In fact, we stop mass-murderers most of the time. We stopped about 20 attempted mass-murders each year over the last eight years. Where ordinary citizens are allowed to go armed, they stopped almost two thirds of the attempted mass-murders in 2022. That fraction is going up as more and more people carry concealed in public. We would stop more murders if politicians didn’t disarm us in so called “gun-free” zones.
As I said, murder doesn’t happen very often or everywhere. Even when we include our failed cities, murder takes one-out-of-20-thousand of us each year. In contrast, one-out-of-9-thousand of us use a firearm to prevent murder as we defend ourselves, our family, and our neighbors. That is right, we stop murderers most of the time, and that is a good thing. Ordinary citizens like us defend ourselves with a firearm over 7-thousand times a day.
Our wonderful ability to stop criminal violence makes more sense once you know how common it is for ordinary citizens to go armed. Over 17-million of us carry a personal firearm in public every day. That is between one-in-a-dozen and one-in-13 of the adults you see on the street. That might surprise you because concealed is concealed.
Politicians stay in office by promising to solve our problems. They told us that more ink on paper would stop violence. They don’t tell us that we have over 23-thousand firearms regulations today. Politicians are creative, so they can always invent more reasons for a press release. I’m sure the next magic words will succeed where the previous thousand laws failed.
The mainstream media has to sell deodorant or they go out of business. In the real world, we’ve been trying to make ourselves safer for centuries. We are doing a pretty good job of it when the politicians get out of our way. That makes perfect sense once you take a minute and think about it.