Yeah, I agree with Will Bunch, the whole, "It's too soon," line after NFL player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and then himself in order to put off public discussion of overdue gun control measures annoys me as well, since multiple-victim gun crimes happen all the time in America. What's too soon for the latest shooting is indeed just a few days or even hours prior to the next shooting. Indeed, a multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the U.S. So it's always appropriate and timely to ask why Americans need so many damn guns -- especially semi-automatic handguns and big ammo clips.
In preemptive response to this latest shooting, conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and AEI's John Lott (FOX's go-to gun apologist after high-profile shooting rampages) have been trotting out the usual statistics about the high rate of gun crime in cities with stricter gun control, like New York and Washington, DC, hoping that we'll pretend America isn't wide open, as if somebody couldn't easily buy a gun in another city or state and take it into NYC or DC... which is exactly what they do.
They also point to relatively lower gun crime rates in right-to-carry (RTC) states; however, they fail to cite gun crime statistics before & after concealed-carry or RTC laws were passed, so that we can analyze the before-and-after effect. In fact, these were places with lower incidence of gun crime beforehand as well. Based on all the evidence, Yale Law School professor John J. Donahue concluded that:
All we can really say is that we know that there is no evidence of reduction in violent crime when RTC laws are passed, and that, although there is evidence of increases in property crime, the theoretical basis for such a finding is weak. We do know that anything that increases the number of guns in circulation will increase the number of guns in the hands of criminals, since about 1.5 million guns are stolen every year. [Emphasis mine. - J]
These same conservative commentators are also lying to us that countries with stricter gun control see gun crime increase. It's simply not true. According the PolitiFact, the U.S. has about 3.0 firearm homicides per 100,000 population; while other affluent nations like Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, etc. "typically have rates...far less than one-third the frequency seen in the U.S."
So once again, there is no debate if you're not cherry-picking your facts. People who want guns simply want guns. Their selfish desire for a gun is the only non-BS justification for their ownership, besides our antiquated 2nd Amendment.
And let me throw in another factoid to stir up to pot. Yes, most gun murders do occur in urban areas, as conservatives love to point out, and they are mostly committed by racial minorities in drug-related disputes. However, most multiple-victim shooting rampages -- those evil, senseless murders that leave us shaking our heads and questioning human nature -- are committed by white guys (or white boys) in suburban and rural areas. I'm not ready to say one crime is worse than the other, but at least in the case of drugs crime, we can say that there is some kind of reason... and some hope to mitigate it, like legalizing some drugs, fighting gangs or encouraging drug-addiction treatment. However, there is no such hope to stop multiple-victim shootings, because they happen everywhere, and, almost as a rule, they are committed by white guys with no prior criminal history. The only uniting factor in all multiple-victim shootings is easy, legal access to deadly firearms.
By Will Bunch
December 4, 2012 | Huffington Post
