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March 15, 2008
The Facts
Washington DC ban hand guns in 1976. Now 32 years latter, the results are in. 8,400 people have been murdered since then, most with hand guns. By 1991 homicides reach 479 per year, but subsided later with the decline of crack use.
My View
What’s the old saying; “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”?
Banning hand guns across the board never has and never will prevent criminals from getting hand guns. Criminals, by definition, will not obey a law that bans hand guns. Law abiding citizens rarely use a hand gun to break the law. I grant you that hand guns owned by law abiding citizens have been use to break the law and, on occasion, have been used to kill people, but that is normally when the gun winds up in a criminals hand by thief.
Those who advocate banning hand guns love to cite, as an example in their efforts to ban hand guns, a family member using a family gun that was legally purchased and legally owned to kill their family. That’s because they know if they use the statistics from places that have banned hand guns, such as Washington DC, they would be booed off the preverbal stage. They never acknowledge that a family member who desires to kill their family is going to kill them with something, whether it’s a hand gun or something else.
Read the article on Washington DC’s results here.
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Let’s presume for a moment that your argument is correct- that criminals will commit violent crime regardless of the legal status of the available weaponry.
How then do we explain the 5-fold higher murder rate of the U.S. compared to the U.K.? Is it that Americans are by nature more violent than Brits?