There’s an old law school adage: when you don’t have the facts, pound on the law; when you don’t have the law, pound on the facts, and when you don’t have the facts or the law, pound on the table. Gun-control advocates don’t have facts, the law (2nd Amendment), or anything else, so they pound the table with spurious arguments, dubious statistics, and when nothing else is available, outright lies. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
There’s been little talk of gun control this presidential election cycle, although state-level proposals continue to make it onto state ballots.
Gun control positions have come down along the usual partisan lines. It was clear from Clinton’s comments in the final presidential debate, for example, that she desires greater restrictions on access to firearms for private citizens. She expressed no such caution about weaponry carried by government employees, of course.
While the candidates have declined to make gun control a central issue in the campaign, mainstream media outlets, academics, and pundits continue to press for greater government restrictions and prohibitions on firearms access for private citizens. Meanwhile, of course, government agencies continue to purchase more powerful and more deadly weaponry.
To keep pressing the issue of gun control, it is necessary for advocates to push a narrative in which crime is especially bad, and in which the United States is somehow unique in the world in terms of crime. The actual historical data often contradicts their claims, however, so in order to push their narrative with greater gusto, advocates for gun control employ several different sleight-of-hand rhetorical tricks.
Number One: Imply that Crime Is Increasing
First among these are repeated hints that crime, especially homicide, is becoming worse. This has been especially effective in pushing the idea that homicide is now more common every time a mass shooting takes place.
In reality, of course, homicide rates in in the United States in 2014 were at a 51-year low. They increased from 2014 to 2015, but remained near a 50-year low, and near 1950s levels, which are recognized as an especially un-homicidal period in US history.
Moreover, homicide rates were cut in half from the 1990s to today, in spite of the fact that guns were being purchased in larger and larger numbers over the period.
Obviously, this doesn’t translate well into a pro-gun-control talking point. So, in order to make the case for “increasing” crime, gun-control advocates will take a very short-term time horizon (often of one-year) to create the impression that there is an established trend of increasing crime. For example, homicide did indeed increase from 2014 to 2015, but the longer-term trend is something else entirely. In this report, for example, the authors breathlessly report raw numbers of people killed while conveniently ignoring both historical context and the fact that the United States contains 320,000,000 people. When these statistics are viewed in light of a 20-year trend or as a proportion of the full population, the facts take on a very different meaning.
The key here is to ignore any time horizon beyond the immediate past, since any look at trends since the 1970s would, of course, show that homicides in the United States are in steep decline.
To continue reading: 5 Tricks Gun-Control Advocates Play
