A Self-Defeating Argument on Guns
The Baltimore Sun ran an editorial about the violence in Baltimore over this past Labor Day weekend. Unknowingly, they made a case against further gun control.
As one of the central points of their argument, the Editorial Board writes:
Such a view is, of course, poppycock. Chicago does have a high rate of violence, and, yes, the city has placed restrictions on gun sales and permits. But what has happened there is not unlike what has happened in many other cities, including Baltimore, that have tried to reduce the number of guns that end up in the hands of criminals — the bad guys have the wherewithal to seek their firearms outside city limits.
One of the key arguments that has been made by The Baltimore Sun and since the start of the gun control debate so many decades ago has been the idea that by continuing to introduce more and more restrictions on guns that gun violence will magically stop. Thus the Sun places the blame on gun violence in Baltimore, Chicago, and other cities with restrictive gun ownership not on the gun controls themselves, but on Congress and on gun laws in other states:
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Maryland has had a similar experience. Data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have pointed to the high number of guns used to commit crimes here that originate in states with less restrictive ownership laws. Of the more than 5,000 firearms recovered by the ATF in Maryland in 2014, for instance, more than 2,200 originated out of state, many of them from Virginia and Pennsylvania. And that’s consistent with what the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research has found: Places with tougher gun laws end up dealing with criminals who acquire their guns elsewhere.
Now, there are a couple of points in there that a key to note, particularly as it relates to the secondary point regarding crimes originating in states with less restrictive gun laws. The “travel” if you will of gun crime from states with more lax gun laws to states with higher gun controls is a favorite canard of gun control advocates. However they also ignore the most obvious conclusion about gun crime from these statistics. These liberals assume that the guns themselves are the cause of the increase in crime rates. At no point have they considered the fact that criminals migrate from states with high rates of legal gun ownership to states with lower rates of legal gun ownership because the citizenry in the latter is less capable of defending themselves than citizens in the former. This is a phenomenon that has been studied in Dr. John R. Lott’s seminal work “More Guns, Less Crime.”
The second key issue with the Sun editorial is the fact that, once again, the Sun Editorial Board again ignores the most obvious conclusion from gun laws in Baltimore and other cities. It is the assumption that more restrictions on legal gun ownership are going to turn criminals into solid citizens. There is no logic for such assumption, other than wishful thinking from the naive of willful ignorance from committed gun grabbers. We makes this argument time after time when it comes to gun laws in Baltimore and beyond; there is no logic, no rationale to think that any more gun laws are going to make criminals abide by them. A criminal who wants to commit more crimes is not going to concerned with obtaining another crime in order to obtain the gun.
Liberal editorial pages love to write editorial after editorial about the “need” for more gun laws despite the lack of evidence that any such laws would deal with the problem. The Sun Editorial Board should be less concerned with gun control, and a bit more concerned with crime control.
