Bearing Arms Takes Down Salon

Tom Knighton over at Bearing Arms has a post today entitled Salon Says 'Guns Are Winning.' Why That's A Good Thing. Clearly an intriguing title that deserves a click and a quick read. That quick read threw me back to the 1960s and the Kennedy assassination. I was 11 years old then, but I remember it like it was yesterday. The radio reports of the shooting and subsequent rush to the hospital where Kennedy was pronounced dead were broadcast to us through the loudspeaker system used for daily announcements.

I also remember that the need for gun control was ramping up before that event in 1963, with various politicians telling us that certain nefarious types carried around cheap pistols known as "Saturday Night Specials." They look an awful lot like the snub-nosed pistols police detectives carried. These "deadly" firearms were often said to be as dangerous to the user as the goblin he was targeting. Then as now, stoking fear was a major feature of the media.  Five years later, and after another Kennedy assassination, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA 68). By then I was 16 and had a sense of human nature that said this legislation would prove to be counter productive. I was right.

Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re going to look at total numbers since JFK’s assassination, particularly with regard to guns, then maybe we should look at trends from that time and not cherry pick things to look as scary as possible.

JFK was killed in 1963. The Gun Control Act followed five years later. Not an immediate reaction, to say the least, but looking at the provisions in that law makes it clear it was, in part, a response to the assassination.

Please go read Knighton's article. I am off to the range.

And what happened immediately after JFK was killed and continued after the GCA was passed? The homicide rate increased.

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That’s from the New York Times. What it shows is an increase in the homicide rate that spiked up in the aftermath of the Gun Control Act and continued to be sky high until the early 1990s and didn’t really get down to the early 1960s homicide rate until around 2010 or so.

During that time, we didn’t see a whole lot of gun control being passed. The Brady Bill was passed in 1993 and we had the now-sunset Assault Weapon Ban in 1994, but violent crime was already starting its downward trend, nearly 30 years after JFK’s assassination.

If I, a snot nosed kid of 16 at the time could see where this was heading, surely the men who proposed and eventually voted for the law could see it as well. I won't say that ALL the people who supported this law did for cynical and disingenuous reasons, but certainly the men who proposed it did. GCA68 was never intended to control crime, and indeed it did not. It was, as always, a good first step to disarming us. Moreover, at the time, the NRA was on board with GCA 68, whether out of naivete` or the belief that their hunting and sporting arms would never be in the crosshairs.

Eventually, GCA 68 along with the original National Firearms Act (NFA) must go by the wayside as Unconstitutional acts of a too intrusive government. In the meantime:

As guns have become more popular and people are carrying them more often, the homicide rate has trended downward. Even the spike of 2020 was nothing compared to the murder rates of the 1970s and ’80s.

So, in a way, the premise is right, even if not for the reason the author wants us to think. The guns really are winning. They’re making us safer.