The Open Society’s Closed Mind on Guns

In March, The Open Society, part of the Soros Foundation Network, released
“Gun Control in the United States,” a strikingly simplistic evaluation of
gun laws in the 50 states. Directed by Rebecca Peters, an Australian gun
prohibitionist, this claptrap posing as analysis arbitrarily awards various
point values to each state that has imposed gun control restrictions favored
by the group.
Such restrictions include, for example, compact handgun prohibitions, gun
registration and gun owner licensing, various gun sale regulations and gun
storage requirements. States that do not allow local jurisdictions to impose
gun laws more restrictive than state law are penalized in the Society’s
point system. States that prohibit the filing of junk lawsuits against the
firearm industry are also penalized, as are states that do not duplicate the
federal age requirement for possessing a handgun.

Out of a maximum of 100 points possible in the Society’s point system, only
seven states received scores above 30%. The other 43 states, the Society
claims, “lack even ?basic gun control laws’ [and therefore] fall below
minimum standards for public safety.” Twenty-three of the supposedly
sub-standard states got scores of zero or below. You would never know this
is a country with more than 20,000 gun laws.

The only real value in the Society’s evaluation is that it tells us the
extent to which this particular anti-gun activist group favors different
types of gun control laws. The Society makes no attempt to correlate the
laws it favors to any effect on crime, hoping that its acknowledgment that
“the relationship between particular regulatory measures and violence lies
outside the scope of this survey,” will pacify the average reader.

The simple truth, of course, is that the “particular regulatory measures” we
know as “gun control” are absolute failures in the war on crime. Case in
point: the average violent crime rate of the seven states whose gun laws the
Society believes best is 21% higher than the average rate for the 43 states
the Society believes are “below minimum standards for public safety.” Of the
10 states that have the lowest violent crime rates in America, eight
received scores of zero or below, and the Society’s favorite state,
Massachusetts, has a violent crime rate five times higher than its least
favorite state, Maine.

In truth, Texas has achieved its lowest homicide rate since the 1950s, but
under the Society’s cock-eyed, politically-driven grading system, the Lone
Star state gets a 47th ranking. The other two of the three largest states,
California and New York, were ranked 3rd and 8th best by the Society, though
their violent crime rates are 41% higher and 13% higher, respectively, than
that of Texas.

In the final analysis, The Open Society’s only measuring rod is its own
hatred of guns?the more objectionable a law is to a law-abiding gun owner .
. . the harder a law makes it for a law-abiding citizen to acquire or
possess a gun . . . the closer a law moves toward a total prohibition on gun
ownership, the better the Society likes it. Fine, that’s their right in our
free and open society, just don’t lecture us about “standards for public
safety.”