To those who've heard the repetitive song of the gun control crowd, the hysterical refrain is a familiar one: "more handguns and more freedom will lead to more crime and more violence."
Since the landmark Supreme Court decisions that struck down restrictive gun ban laws in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, the "more-guns-equals-more-crime" contingent has predicted soaring murder and violent crime rates. Anti-gun politicians and their media sycophants decried the Supreme Court's rulings and assured us that mayhem would follow.
Guess what? They were wrong. Again.
According to a September 30 FoxNews.com opinion piece by John Lott, newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn't rise after the bans were eliminated--they plummeted. In fact, they have fallen much more than the national crime rate.
So what have the naysayers said about this positive trend? Nothing. Not a peep.
According to Lott, in the first six months of this year, there were 14 percent fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year (when owning handguns was illegal), which marks the largest drop in Chicago's murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982. Similarly, in the year after the 2008 Heller decision, the murder rate in Washington, D.C., fell two-and-a-half times faster than in the rest of the country.
When law-abiding citizens are able to exercise their Second Amendment rights, crime drops. When guns are banned, murder and violent crime rates increase.
We still have more work to do to completely restore Second Amendment rights to the law-abiding citizens of Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and NRA-ILA will continue to pursue all remedies to that end.
In the meantime, don't listen to the silence
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