MCViewPoint

We aren’t supposed to worry, the government (FBI, the government’s Fife) will protect us. You know, like in Florida.

https://mises.org/blog/fbi-us-homicide-rate-51-year-low

As Pew has reported in recent years, in fact, the American public is “unaware” that the homicide rate in the United States has fallen by 49 percent over the past twenty years. And while Pew doesn’t report on it, it’s also a safe bet that the public is also unaware that homicide rates have collapsed as total gun ownership in the United States has increased significantly.

Over a recent 20 year period, the number of new guns in the US that were either manufactured in the US or imported into the US increased 141 percent from 6.6 million new guns in 1994 to 16 million in 2013. That means a gross total of 132 million new guns were added into the US population over that time period…

Naturally, these facts are steadfastly ignored by people who can’t do basic arithmetic, like the constitutional law Professor David S. Cohen who wrote Monday at Rolling Stone that the second Amendment must be repealed because it is “a threat to liberty” and a “suicide pact.”

Cohen’s argument rests largely on the idea that gun violence it out of control and that guns are different now than they were in the 18th century. One cannot argue with the former part. But are guns significantly different today from what they were twenty years ago? Clearly, the answer to that is no, and given that homicide rates have plummeted since then, Cohen needs to explain why repealing the second Amendment is advisable when increases in gun ownership have coincided with declines in homicides.

Moreover, we must ask ourselves if the US was engaged in a “suicide pact” in the 1940s and 1950s when homicide rates where at historic lows, when the Second Amendment existed, and when gun control measures were very weak by modern standards…

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