Big Easy Context
Don?t Let Grabbers Use School Shooting to Ignore Solutions that are Saving Children
by dischord
(distribution permitted and encouraged)

Let?s not let gun grabber extremists use the latest school shooting in New Orleans as a springboard to undermine reductions in youth violence with new laws that would do nothing but divert money, time and manpower from solutions that are working.

Louisiana gets very bad ?grades? when it comes to gun control The Saros Foundation this year gave it a -8 (yes negative; with 100 = excellent) matching Alaska and beating only Maine. Nonetheless despite almost no gun control, the state has seen greater than a 55.4% decrease in firearm homicide rates among African American males 15-19 (the most at risk group from race, sex and age perspectives).

In 1993, the peak of firearm violence in Louisiana, the firearm homicide rate for this group was 178/100,000. By 1998, that had dropped 55.4% to 79.4/100,000. Given that 1999 and 2000 have seen further reductions in firearm homicides (though official government breakdown of the numbers are not out yet), we can safely say that the danger for this group in the past seven years has declined by 60% or more.

However, despite this breathtaking improvement we?re sure to hear from gun control extremists who will point (out of this context) to today?s school shooting in New Orleans of two black male youth, and use it to scare Americans into a false sense of crisis about guns. You cannot logically call something that?s gotten 60% better in seven years a crisis.

Things are getting better. We?ve found solutions to our gun problems; solutions that erase gun violence by 50% or more in less than a decade. But societal problems do not disappear overnight; we can expect more events like New Orleans. Let?s not let these events shock us into a panic mode in which we run from new idea to new idea, neglecting the solutions that work.

Remember, violence is getting better at an amazing rate, and there is little that could be added to our efforts that would make the problem get better faster. For the children, stay the course. (Data source: Centers for Disease Control at http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars).