Guns, Guns, Everywhere Are Guns...

One of the more trying bits of New England life was listening to liberal drivel evidenced by the following: a neighbor suggested that they believed that guns should not be made and that no one should possess guns. No one. Not the police or public....because, you know, then no one would ever, ever get hurt by guns. Yeah, right.

Are you through vomiting already? Okay, back to the post:

Lee at Right-Thinking had a link to this story that, without a doubt, makes all those gun-control liberals look like the idiots they are:

The experiences in the U.K. and Australia, two island nations whose borders are much easier to monitor, should also give Canadian gun controllers some pause. The British government banned handguns in 1997 but recently reported that gun crime in England and Wales nearly doubled in the four years from 1998-99 to 2002-03.

Crime was not supposed to rise after handguns were banned. Yet, since 1996 the serious-violent-crime rate has soared by 69 percent; robbery is up 45 percent, and murders up 54 percent. Before the law, armed robberies had fallen 50 percent from 1993 to 1997, but as soon as handguns were banned the robbery rate shot back up, almost to its 1993 level.

The 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey, the last survey completed, shows the violent-crime rate in England and Wales was twice the rate of that in the U.S. When the new survey for 2004 comes out later this year, that gap will undoubtedly have widened even further as crimes reported to British police have since soared by 35 percent, while those in the U.S. have declined 6 percent.

Australia has also seen its violent-crime rates soar immediately after its 1996 Port Arthur gun-control measures. Violent crime rates averaged 32-percent higher in the six years after the law was passed (from 1997 to 2002) than they did in 1995. The same comparisons for armed-robbery rates showed increases of 74 percent.

During the 1990s, just as Britain and Australia were more severely regulating guns, the U.S. was greatly liberalizing individuals' abilities to carry firearms. Thirty seven of the fifty states now have so-called right-to-carry laws that let law-abiding adults carry concealed handguns after passing a criminal background check and paying a fee. Only half the states require some training, usually around three to five hours. Yet crime has fallen even faster in these states than the national average. Overall, the states in the U.S. that have experienced the fastest growth rates in gun ownership during the 1990s have experienced the biggest drops in murders and other violent crimes.

Many things affect crime: The rise of drug-gang violence in Canada and Britain is an important part of the story, just as it has long been important in explaining the U.S.'s rates. (Few Canadians appreciate that 70 percent of American murders take place in just 3.5 percent of our counties, and that a large percentage of those are drug-gang related.) Just as these gangs can smuggle drugs into the country, they can smuggle in weapons to defend their turf.

With Canada's reported violent-crime rate of 963 per 100,000 in 2003, a rate about twice the U.S.'s (which is 475), Canada's politicians are understandably nervous.

It's a bitch when the facts get in the way of your liberal moonbat-utopian views.

Extra, Extra:

Here is a local example of how an armed citizenry can help fight crime:

In an attempt to get the clerk to fork over the cash, a robber held up a convenience store Wednesday afternoon .. with a fork. It happened at the Food Mart on Hearne and Blanchard in Shreveport. The would-be robber came at the clerk with the fork, wrapped up to look like a gun. When the clerk realized the weapon was a fork, she grabbed a bat from behind the counter, hit the robber and chased him outside. That's when a man pumping gas pulled out a gun and held the robber until police arrived. Police promptly arrested Drrick Dwayne Franklin and charged him with attempted armed robbery.