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One problem with our ongoing national "gun control" debate is that there aren't many truly objective facts available to illuminate the discussion. Pundits spin whatever numbers they find to support whatever side they're on. This sort of dishonesty hardens attitudes instead of persuading people.
That's why we were overjoyed to see numbers about gun ownership in the Washington Post - our liberal friends can't plausibly accuse us of spin. The article even explained why the parties involved are talking past each other instead of communicating:
The traditional understanding is that there's one overarching problem - gun violence - that can be addressed by a more or less uniform set of solutions: better background checks, improved technology, etc. ...
But one shortcoming of this approach is that it elides over the sometimes drastic differences in how different populations experience gun violence and gun ownership in their lives. The Brookings Institution's Richard Reeves highlighted one stunning example of this in a recent blog post: Among whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides. But among black Americans, 82 percent of gun deaths are homicides. [emphasis added]
Bluntly put: Whites shoot themselves, blacks shoot each other.
The Post admits that gun murders have declined nationwide as gun ownership has increased. The anti-gun faction lumps suicide in with murder, however, to argue that guns should be confiscated because gun deaths, which include suicide, haven't gone down:
The growing suicide rate has effectively canceled out the nation's declining rate of gun-related homicides, resulting in a national gun fatality rate that has been stubbornly stagnant since the late 1990s. [emphasis added]
The Post's statistics about gun ownership also explain the high black homicide rate:
About 41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households, according to a 2014 Pew survey. And white Americans (62 percent) are more likely than black Americans (54 percent) to say that gun ownership does more to protect people than endanger personal safety. [emphasis added]
Twice as many white families own guns as black families. Whites state that gun ownership is important for protection because they either have guns and can protect themselves or know someone who does have a gun.
How would unarmed blacks know anything about self-protection? Most of them live in our Democrat-ruled disaster cities - Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago - all of which have strict gun control laws. As "America's Mass-Shooting Capital Is Chicago" points out:
West Garfield Park, population 18,000, had 21 murders last year, which makes for a homicide rate of 116 per 100,000 people. The world's leader in murders, Honduras, has a homicide rate of 90, according to the United Nations.
Following West Garfield Park in lethality was West Englewood and its 73.3 murder rate, more than second-place Venezuela with its 53.7 rate. Chicago's Chatham (58) beats Belize (44.7); Englewood (52.6) outdoes El Salvador (41.2); South Chicago (48) tops Guatemala (39.9). The United States as a whole has 4.5 murders per 100,000.
The Post stated that gun homicides have gone down as gun ownership has increased. Black neighborhoods have high murder rates because the government has disarmed the good guys and they can't shoot back. Criminals always prefer unarmed victims. Gun control laws that trap people in victim disarmament zones are directly responsible for many murders.
This is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, meant when he warned Harvard graduates of:
"an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses" and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil ... evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature."
He also said, "In order for men to commit great evil, they must first be convinced that they are doing good."
Liberals are so convinced that their anti-gun programs are good that they can't see the evil that they do. This is the first set of MSM statistics we've seen that unequivocally supports repeal of anti-gun laws in Democrat-ruled areas - and there are thousands of card-carrying liberals who've now read the truth in their own party bible. We hope that sanity will eventually prevail.