This Election Year: 1993
For Grabbers, This Elections is About Last Decade?s Problems.
by dischord
(distribution permitted and encouraged)

Have you noticed that gun control advocates rarely talk about trends anymore? Do a quick review of the ?facts? sections of most of the anti-gun websites, and you?ll see a lot about gun death rates, but if you look closely, you see that most of their numbers are old. Why is that?

You can bet that if firearm death rates still were rising, like they were a decade ago, that they?d update the facts sections as soon as the government released another year?s statistics. But firearm death rates are at their lowest levels in decades, and show every sign of falling farther, especially given that the ?baby boomlet? (boomers? kids) seems to be passing through the violence prone years of 15-25 without causing a spike in violence. Indeed, as the proportion of that age group increases, violence is falling.

In fact, firearm-related violence (and all violence, excepting non-firearm suicide) are seeing breathtaking drops, and within the decade we could see violence and violent death drop to their lowest rates in 80 years. We?re already at the lowest rate in nearly 40.

But back to the original question: have you noticed that they rarely talk about trends anymore? They are stuck in the early 1990s ? or at least, they?d like the public to remain stuck in the fear of early 1990s. And to an extent, with the help of body-bag TV journalism, they?ve accomplished that.

I did a web search for phrases like ?record gun violence? ?increasing gun homicide? ?rising firearm deaths? and so forth, and I found numerous newspaper articles, letters to the editors and such ? written this year ? that cite an increasing problem with gunshot death in the U.S.

In fact, I even found two congressional candidates (Illinois 15th candidate Mike Kellerher and Maryland 8th candidate Terry Lierman) who allege an increasing gun violence problem in making their case for election.

Kelleher speaks of the media being partly to blame for ?rising gun violence,? but that shouldn?t be an excuse to forgo gun control (http://www.kelleher2000.com/news/releases/07.03.durbin.html),
and Lierman explains that ?…an unprecedented opportunity exists for Congress to take effective steps to curb record gun violence? (http://www.terrylierman.com/Issues/GunControl.html).

Now, I can forgive a flustered letter writer who?s fallen victim to the gun controllers propaganda about rising gun violence, but candidates for Congress? Have these would-be policy makers fallen prey too, or are they willing participants? I don?t know. But I do know they are using the incorrect notion of a mounting problem to justify action.

That?s why this election is so important. You see, if the wrong side wins, we *will* get gun control. And just like the grabbers are wrongly giving credit to the current declines to Brady (so says the pro control Journal of the American Medical Association), they will wrongly give credit for the coming declines to whatever paradoxical ?merely-inconvenient-but-really-really-tough? gun controls they?ll foist on us.

But if we win…if we stave off this drive, by the 2002 cycle, we?ll have enough evidence about there being no need for gun control to lower violence, and, hopefully, enough of the public will agree.

Whoever wins this election wins the debate of whether gun control works. It won?t be about facts. It will be about public perceptions.