The thing I find particularly frustrating about the ongoing gun control and Second Amendment argument involves the clear lack of facts in the discussion. With 41 years of law enforcement experience I have seen crime at its peak and at its zenith. At this point, crime in America peaked in 1991 — oddly enough, when I was a Detective in the Robbery Bureau. It was nothing for me to carry a monthly caseload of 40 to 50 reports, and there were five other detectives in the unit with a similar caseload.
Since then, the gun homicide rate has gone down 49%.
Despite national attention to the issue of firearm violence, most Americans are unaware that gun crime is lower today than it was two decades ago. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, today 56% of Americans believe gun crime is higher than 20 years ago and only 12% think it is lower.
With that in mind, a brave criminologist dares to speak the truth. From, of all places, USAToday.com:
James Alan Fox: Umpqua shooting – a tragedy, not a trend
Another mass shooting sears deep into our collective consciousness, but it is hype and hysteria on the rise, not violence.
by James Alan Fox
Another mass shooting sears deep into the collective consciousness of the American people. Another school — this time a community college in an otherwise peaceful town in rural Oregon — is devastated by a young man taking aim at students trapped in classrooms. Nine are murdered, and many others wounded, before the gunman is killed in a shootout with the police.
Within a few hours, President Obama appeared before the camera, reinforcing the notion that America is under siege. “Somehow this has become routine,” noted Obama with obvious emotion. “The reporting is routine.”
Mr Fox writes with insight and truth:
Although the sense of urgency may be overstated, Obama is certainly correct about the almost formulaic media response. The Oregon shooting had countless news outlets flooding the airwaves and the Internet with questionable statistics on the incidence of mass shootings along with sidebar listings of the deadliest shooting sprees in U.S. history. In the usual rush to offer up some breaking information, news reports were embellished with unconfirmed details about the massacre and the assailant that did little but fuel a contagion of fear.
It is this PSH (Pants-Shitting Hysteria) — ginned up by Leftists — which has a distinct purpose.
Further adding to the state of alarm and confusion, headlines featured scary yet conflicting statistics from various sources. By reducing the standard threshold in defining a mass shooting (four or more killed by gunfire, not including the perpetrator), the incidence can reach incredible proportions. For example, the “Mass Shooting Tracker” website redefines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people (including the assailant) are shot, but not necessarily killed. By this criterion, there have been nearly 300 thus far this year.
Mr Fox nails the truth in his final paragraph.
According to a careful analysis of data on mass shootings (using the widely accepted definition of at least four killed), the Congressional Research Service found that there are, on average, just over 20 incidents annually. More important, the increase in cases, if there was one at all, is negligible. Indeed, the only genuine increase is in hype and hysteria.
With all that, why the Leftist emphasis on gun control? To what point or end? There is only one conclusion to draw.
In fact, the New York Daily News demands that the US State Department categorize the NRA as a terrorist organization:
On October 3–two days after a gunman killed 10 at the gun free facilities on the Umpqua Community College campus–the New York Daily News called for the U.S. State Department to designate the National Rifle Association (NRA) a “terrorist organization.”
They based this request on their belief that national security faces a greater threat from armed citizens than from “foreign terrorists,” and they singled out the NRA as the bulwark preserving citizens’ right to keep and bear arms. They suggested, “The NRA should take its rightful place on the State Department list of terrorist organizations, because its influence is more of an immediate threat to the lives of our citizens than foreign terrorists.”
Does that mean that blacks, no matter where they are in the US, are also part of a “terrorist organization”? That would only be fair. Because this past weekend in Chicago:
CHICAGO (Sun-Times Media Wire) – At least eight people have been wounded in shootings across the city since Friday night.
Simultaneously, again in Chicago, as Texas Fred so cogently points out:
Nearly 75 people reportedly overdosed on dangerous narcotics, possibly heroin laced with painkiller fentanyl, in Chicago over a three-day span, according to city health and fire officials.
Just one city. Just one weekend. No mention of this by the American Media Maggots. No mention of this by our Racist In Chief. There is only one conclusion to draw.
Of course, this is insanity writ large for that Leftist Dogma media outlet to . For one, the NRA would have to be “state sponsored” to qualify.
No mention is made that the children, teachers, and students shot in schools were shot in gun free zones by gunmen who knew their victims could not return fire. Moreover, no utterance given to the fact that the NRA was a leading voice in calling for a change in the gun free policies following the heinous attack on Sandy Hook–they wanted laws changed so teachers could quit begging for their lives and start keeping a gun close at hand with which to defend their lives and the lives of their students.
Why no consideration for the obvious immediate solution? There is only one conclusion to draw. If the school shootings stop, the best leverage Democrats and the American Media Maggots have to pass gun control vanishes. Poof.
Therefore, students and teachers cannot be allowed to defend themselves. Let the bodies hit the floor. Because the mental defectives are still out there.
Whites (except this past shooter who was of a mixed-race, white/black, from the UK — who CNN is portraying as white) involved in shootings need to be classified as terrorists. Blacks involved in a continuing series of non-stop killings of blacks in large Demorat-controlled cities are not. They’re not mentioned. It’s as if the fact that Chicago is having its deadliest murder month in over a decade — well, that just doesn’t exist. Yes. 59 murders of blacks by blacks in one month.
I do not see Mr Obama or any Leftist or Demorat pointing fingers at blacks for shooting blacks, children and infants. I don’t see any mention of this at all.
Then there is the issue of mental defectives.
Unfortunately, Reagan brought the issue of shutting down the bulk of mental hospitals in California to the forefront; he began diverting funding. The trend continued because Leftists believed each “sanitarium” was a cesspool of horror. The bottom line is that when you remove these institutions, the mentally defective live on the streets, commit crimes, and stay with their parents or isolate themselves, often refusing to take medications or remaining entirely unprescribed.
And here’s the nasty fact no one wants to address: left to themselves, absent firearms, they would resort to vehicles to kill others, clubs, rocks, knives, machetes, crossbows, garrotes, acids and the like. Because they are mentally defective.
Many of these people are only treated in jails and prisons because they have already offended. As there was little available for them on the street. And trust me, mental treatment in jail is barely plugging a huge hole in the hull. The ship is still sinking.
Some of these people will never be “brought back.” Some of these people are not even remotely treatable. But because we, societally, have determined that we won’t warehouse those who really shouldn’t walk the streets, they walk the streets. They live with their parents, with family members who may be afraid of them themselves.
The firearm is just a TOOL. Remove that one TOOL from the toolbelt of the mentally unhinged and defective, they will find ANOTHER tool to replace it of equal or higher offense.
But the issue becomes the tool, not the organic human being.
There is only one conclusion to draw.
Leftists, Obama and Demorats wish to completely disarm the citizens of the United States of America.
So what’s the next step?
An Obama Executive Order. Gun control by fiat.
BZ
I’ll just do it all my own self, Mr Obama says. I shall rule from on high via executive fiat.
For the ignorant amongst us — that would include you, Millennials — here is what Article 1 of the US Constitution says. In a nutshell.
Plus: now you’re a single mother. You suffer from post-partum depression. You want a firearm for protection because your apartment complex is rife with drug dealers and you want to protect your child. Is your doctor now mandated to contact the FBI? Under this EO your doctor is mandated to go around HIPAA privacy laws to rat you out. But who truly is “fit to own a firearm”? No one in the federal government can answer that question.
Ideology doesn’t just stop at the Spite House. It can surely exist in your doctors office. What will you say? What can you say?
Background checks will not solve the issue of gun suicide. Those who are intent on suicide will simply transition from guns to rocks to pills to knives to state-sponsored death.
The 
P.S.
