Justice Department: Gun Violence Is Down

As New England liberals have a conniption over the NRA’s Annual Meeting, they say that the Second Amendment rights organization is becoming a “paramilitary” group, and that their resolve to institute more gun control has been strengthened.  The only problem is that the Department of Justice reported today that gun violence is down.

Yet, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both Democrats from Connecticut, can say these things because they’re safe in the relative confines of a liberal state.  Yet, Sen. Murphy also had this comparison for those who support the Bill of Rights.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on states nullifying federal gun laws: I mean, let’s look at the context of nullification. Nullification was last used by Southern states to try to eviscerate Civil Rights legislation, to try to prevent states from basically enforcing desegregation and frankly, I think history will look back on this round of nullification as kindly as it did on the last round.

It is laughable also because it is a total bastardization of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not an absolute right, not a God given right, always had conditions upon it like the First Amendment has. The idea that the Second Amendment was put in there in order to allow citizens to fight their government is insane.

If that was the case, we wouldn’t have also included treason in the United States Constitution. We basically said if you take arms up against the government, we’re going to knock your block off. And that’s what the early presidents ended up doing in Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. The Second Amendment is not designed to allow the citizenry to arm itself against the government and nullification is another example of states not really understanding the true nature of that amendment.

So, before we get on with this history lesson, let’s look at what the Washington Post reported today on this issue of guns – and gun violence.

Gun violence has dropped dramatically nationwide over the past two decades, but nearly three-quarters of all homicides are still committed with a firearm, the Justice Department said in a report released Tuesday.

The report, by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, painted an encouraging picture of long-term trends at a time of divisive political debate over guns and legislation to regulate them. Firearms-related homicides declined 39 percent between 1993 and 2011, the report said, while nonfatal firearms crimes fell 69 percent during that period.

[…]

Overall, the Justice Department report said, firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011, while nonfatal firearm crimes declined from 1.5 million in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011. The drop extended to schools: Homicides at schools declined from an average of 29 per year in the 1990s to an average of 20 per year in the 2000s.

Although the rate of firearms homicides for African Americans declined by 51 percent over the past two decades, that rate was still 14.6 per 100,000 people in 2010 — compared to 1.9 for whites.

Well, you saw that black to white crime juxtapostion coming from the Post, but it still dropped by 51%.  All of these figures are positive, and it wasn’t because the U.S. adopted more gun control.