The Way to Deal with Murders Is To Deal Harshly with Murderers

Trevor Thomas today in the American Thinker points to the real way we should deal with murderers using guns, and it is not to pass more gun control.  As always with professional writers, as opposed to your humble servant, Thomas says it better than I have stated the case, but it is the same:

The only way to reduce murder is to recognize that it is an act of evil that must be dealt with from a proper political and spiritual perspective. Men murder because their hearts are dark. To stop them, we must meet force with force. To change men, we must get to their hearts. Sound legislation can work to protect us, but focusing on the weapon of murder and attempting to legislate away evil by targeting a tool is the height of folly.

Thomas starts out by explaining that he and his siblings grew up around guns. Even when his brother as a young teen had a hunting accident with a faulty gun that eventually required removing his right arm, neither he nor his brother blamed guns, or because afraid of them. Indeed, his brother learned to shoot even rifles with one arm, and there is a picture of him shooting a compound bow!  All of that is to lead up to his discussion of statistical information about guns, population, and murder rate. He presents a great deal of data getting down to the county level, much as John Lott has done. At this level, one thing becomes clear:

At the state level – where data is more readily available – the numbers reveal the same: there's no correlation between the presence of guns and the rate of murder. The average murder rate for the first 25 states (lowest half of gun ownership rates) is 5.0. The average murder rate ranking for the last 25 states (upper half of gun ownership rates) is 4.9.

For the bottom ten and top ten, the average is 4.2 and 4.3, respectively. The average murder rate ranking for the first 25 states is 24.4. The average murder rate ranking for the last 25 states is 27.6. For the bottom ten and top ten, the average is 22.8 and 23.7, respectively. Put simply, more guns does not mean more murder. And inversely, fewer guns does not mean fewer murders. Put another way, more laws against gun ownership has done almost nothing to reduce the rate of murder in America.

The emphasis is mine. The fact that the existence or absence of guns seems not to affect the murder rate leads to his conclusion that we must instead deal harshly with the evil of a person that murders another. As we used to do, by the way.  The problem of murders can not be solved, it has been with us since Cain killed his brother Able.  But we can at least reduce the worst of it by using the remedies outline in the Old Testament:  blood must be paid with blood.

We often note that part of the problem that makes this issue so intractable is that the Left seems to substitute emotion for reasoned, thoughtful, consideration of the facts and statistics. We say things like this, I suspect out of disappointment that our thoughtful research seems to have been thrown out by the Left without even looking into what we have discovered, and then they propose a study that has so many holes in it, you might think we had used it for target practice.

But the Left is not stupid, nor irrational, it simply has different goals.  The Left firmly believes, against all evidence (which may be why they ignore our evidence) that they are smarter, and know better how we should lead our lives.  And that is putting the best spin on it.  Sometimes, they stray into the realm of thinking that some of us should not be allowed to live at all!  The Lefts goal then is totalitarianism, and the only way to achieve it is by irrational means.  We have seen this movie before, and it does not end well.