An admission of obvious truth, from an unlikely source, as most urban police chiefs are political creatures who serve at the pleasure of leftist bosses.
Detroit— If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday.
Urban police chiefs are typically in favor of gun control or reluctant to discuss the issue, but Craig on Thursday was candid about how he’s changed his mind.
“When we look at the good community members who have concealed weapons permits, the likelihood they’ll shoot is based on a lack of confidence in this Police Department,” Craig said at a press conference at police headquarters, adding that he thinks more Detroit citizens feel safer, thanks in part to a 7 percent drop in violent crime in 2013.
Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009.
“Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation.
“I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”
In a moment of hilarious irony or comical dishonesty, the local gun grabbing group accused the top cop of approaching the issue too emotionally.
Robyn Thomas, director of the the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco, disagreed.
“I think at its core, his position is an emotional one, based on the idea that people feel safer when they have guns. But studies have shown more guns don’t deter crime,” Thomas said. “There’s no research that shows guns make anyone safer, and it does show that, the more guns in any situation, the higher the likelihood of them harming either the owner, or people who have access to them.”
It’s always the gun grabbers who make the Second Amendment an emotional, rather than logical, issue, twisting every tragedy into another campaign against firearm ownership. They have to make it emotional, because there’s plenty of evidence that more legal gun ownership leads to less crime.
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