More guns equal more crime? Not in 2009, according to FBI

[frigidmagi]

CSMonitor

[quote]The oft-cited credo that more guns equal more crime is being tested by facts on the ground this year: Even as gun ownership has surged in the US in the past year, violent crime, including murder and robbery, has dropped steeply.

Add to that the fact that many experts had predicted higher crime rates as the US grinds through a difficult recession, and the discrepancy has advocates on both sides of the Second Amendment debate rushing to their ramparts.

After several years of crime rates holding relatively steady, the FBI is reporting that violent crimes – including gun crimes – dropped dramatically in the first six months of 2009, with murder down 10 percent across the US as a whole.

Concurrently, the FBI reports that gun sales – especially of assault-style rifles and handguns, two main targets of gun-control groups – are up at least 12 percent nationally since the election of President Obama, a dramatic run on guns prompted in part by so-far-unwarranted fears that Democrats in Congress and the White House will curtail gun rights and carve apart the Second Amendment.

Pro-gun groups jumped at the FBI report, saying it disproves a long-running theory posited by gun-control groups and many in the mainstream media that gun ownership spawns crime and violence. “Anti-gunners have lost another one of their baseless arguments,â€

[Mayabird]

Except a lot of those guns are being bought by the same people building giant stockpiles of guns and ammo to fight the EVIL GOVERNMENT when it shows up to take their giant stockpiles of gun of ammo. It's not like ten people each buying a gun now, but one guy buying all ten. And he already had a bunch.

Incidentally, if you've noticed those statistics about people buying a lot of trucks recently, same thing. The Evil Government is going to take away their trucks, so they have to buy trucks now!

[frigidmagi]

There is some of that, on the flip side first time buyers are up to. Also this has happened before, gun sales have gone up and... crime hasn't. Let me quote the article again.

So far, research has come out with, in essence, a net-zero correlation between gun sales and crime rates