U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Louisville, Chicago and at least a half-dozen other major U.S. cities have a couple of things in common: all have skyrocketing homicides, and a check by AmmoLand News reveals they all have Democrat-controlled administrations. The question is inevitable:
Have reports about the deadly environments in these and other cities influenced an increasing number of Americans to buy guns for personal protection?
According to an ABC News report, “Other major cities that have surpassed yearly homicide records are St. Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; Rochester, New York; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, which broke its record back in August.”
Another liberal bastion, Seattle, may not surpass last year’s body count of 52, but it could be close with three weeks remaining in the year. At last check with the Seattle Homicide Twitter page—not connected to the Seattle Police Department—the Jet City has logged 42 murders so far this year. In 2020, Seattle racked up 52 killings. AmmoLand took a hard look at Seattle and surrounding King County homicides back on Oct. 14, and how gun control measures adopted over the past six years have failed miserably to live up to their sales pitches. Indeed, if it were possible to accomplish less than nothing, Evergreen State gun control would clearly meet the definition.
The ABC report notes Philadelphia has so far tallied 521 slayings (as of Dec. 6), surpassing the annual homicide record of 500. Rochester, NY “broke its 30-year-old record on Nov. 11,” according to Police Capt. Frank Umbrino.
The story also noted Milwaukee has posted 178 homicides, which is a dozen short of last year’s record count, while Minneapolis—where the city council took scissors to the police department budget following the protests generated by the George Floyd incident—reports 91 slayings “six shy of a record set in 1995.”
Chicago has reverted to becoming a slaughterhouse, with at least 739 homicides reported by ABC while the popular HeyJackass.com website has the number at 757 people fatally shot, and a murder total of 805. A final tally will be announced on Jan. 2 or 3 by various sources.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2020, “the volume of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses increased 29.4 percent” over 2019. Those figures may be just a preview of how 2021 will end. Data for this year will not be released until late September 2022, only weeks before the November mid-term elections.
It should come as no surprise to anyone in the firearms community why so many millions of Americans have been “arming up” over the past 19 months since the coronavirus outbreak. According to the most recent estimate from the Crime Prevention Research Center, there are now more than 21.5 million active carry permits and licenses in circulation. That doesn’t count the number of people now carrying without a license in 20 states where permits are no longer required.
Those people, including millions of new gun owners, watched anarchy spread from city to city, as protesters would loudly demand cuts to law enforcement while violent demonstrations were plaguing many cities.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, recognized the importance of this surge three months ago.
“Millions of Americans appreciate now, more than ever, the fact that our Second Amendment protects their right to own a gun,” Gottlieb observed in September. “This should send a message to anti-gun politicians and the gun prohibition lobby that increasing numbers of American citizens aren’t buying the nonsense they’re selling. Instead, these good-sense citizens are buying firearms, learning to use them properly and making it clear they will not surrender their safety, and that of their neighborhoods, to an emboldened criminal element.”
The situation is not helped when politicians seem to be in denial. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “summer of love” prediction in 2020 is now infamous. More recently, former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer, unloaded on District Attorney Larry Krasner for declaring during a press briefing, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”
That probably came as news to the families of the 521 people who have been murdered so far this year in the “City of Brotherly Love.”
According to the ABC report, “Experts say there are a number of reasons possibly connected to the jump in homicides, including strained law enforcement staffing, a pronounced decline in arrests and continuing hardships from the pandemic, but that there is no clear answer across the board.”
That’s not what White House reporters got from Press Secretary Jen Psaki during a briefing a few days ago. Responding to Fox New reporter Peter Doocy about the causes of crime, she said the COVID-19 pandemic is “a root cause” of organized looting incidents, but added, “I think many people have conveyed that and also one of the … root causes of crime in communities is guns and gun violence. And we’ve seen that statistically around the country.”
Psaki did not affix blame to any perpetrators, just guns. That should be a signal to Second Amendment activists about what to expect in January, when lawmakers at the state and Congressional levels get back to work. Using guns as a scapegoat has become a favored strategy among politicians who have advocated for no bail schemes that let more criminals out of jail, and COVID releases from jails and prisons that put criminals back on the streets.
The problem may best be summed up by a comment Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, gave to ABC News for its story.
“It’s terrible to every morning get up and have to go look at the numbers and then look at the news and see the stories,” Kenney said. “It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy and this needs to stop.”
But how? That is always the missing link. Politicians constantly declare violent crime “needs to stop,” but almost invariably, their proposals seem to come back to passing more gun laws, penalizing people who are not committing the murders by adding new restrictions routinely ignored by the criminals who are committing murders.
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About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
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