Ban hands, feet, and hammers! This should be the rabid rallying cry of the left. Instead, they come after rifles, which are used to kill about half as many people per year as “personal weapons” and “blunt objects,” according to FBI data from 2015 – 2019.

While they’re at it, they’d better make chefs use butter knives too, since “knives or cutting implements” were used in 1,035 homicides in 2021, vs. 447 for rifles, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR).

Indeed, in 2019 chefs who legally own sharp objects were apparently an even more dire threat to our safety. Weapons such as those in their possession were used to slay more than four times as many Americans as were rifles like those owned by millions of law-abiding citizens.

Certainly, there have been horrific mass murders by lunatics wielding semi-automatic rifles. The horror of a mass shooting naturally gains massive media coverage. The old adage, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” understandably applies. But laws and policies based on visceral emotion have been shown through the data to be ineffective in reducing the number of slain Americans. In fact, even when it comes to mass shootings, rifles are not the main threat. That position is held by handguns, which were used in more than twice as many such incidents in the span from 1982 to 2022 as rifles, according to Statista, with 148 incidents by handgun vs. 61 by rifle.

The bid to ban guns outright or to come through the back door by making them virtually impossible to bear has run into trouble at the Supreme Court. Most recently the Court in a 6 – 3 decision earlier this year struck down a law in New York state that inhibited the ability to get a permit to carry a firearm outside one’s home. In two decisions in 2008 and 2010, the Court also affirmed that the Second Amendment guarantees the right for law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm for self-defense.

The bid by the left to ban guns outright is destined to fail. There are somewhere around 350,000,000 to 400,000,000 firearms in the U.S. One of the first mass-produced items was the Colt revolver. Gun sales have exploded in the past several years, and this is not just due to current owners buying more firearms. There were 14 million more gun-owning Americans at the end of 2021 than at the start of 2020, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade group.

According to a poll conducted by Epoch Times, even 1 in 9 Democrats purchased a firearm in 2020 as rampant crime cratered the cities they cultivate. The FBI’s UCR shows an increase in homicides of all types from 4.4 per 100,000 persons in 2014 to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2020. This of course came after the 2014 Michael Brown incident in Ferguson, Missouri and the launch of Black Lives Matter support from media, politicians, billionaires, and Fortune 500 corporations.

Fewer than 2% of criminal prisoners had purchased the weapon they used to commit their crime through a retailer, according to a 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates. An estimated 287,400 prisoners had possessed a firearm during their offense.

“Among these, more than half (56%) had either stolen it (6%), found it at the scene of the crime (7%), or obtained it off the street or from the underground market (43%). Most of the remainder (25%) had obtained it from a family member or friend, or as a gift.” according to the survey report.

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Steve Overholt

Latest posts by Steve Overholt (see all)

• I want a burger like THAT picture in the window! - November 1, 2022
• Half dozen NY sheriffs say they won’t fully enforce state’s new gun law that ‘targets law-abiding citizens’ - October 11, 2022
• ‘Knives or cutting implements’ used in over half as many homicides than rifles, FBI data shows - October 11, 2022

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