PA Bill Number: HB335

Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.

Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...

Last Action: Removed from table

Last Action Date: May 1, 2024

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Murders decline as gun sales continues and CCW climbs :: 10/02/2015

Homicides declined again in 2014, continuing a multi-year pattern while the number concealed carry licenses and permits keeps rising; a sticky subject touched on yesterday by the Washington Free Beacon in a story quoting Bellevue’s Alan Gottlieb, just back from last weekend’s 30th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference.

“The gun prohibition lobby and Michael Bloomberg and friends must be choking on this huge drop in homicides,” said Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. “They have been claiming that we have a ‘gun violence’ epidemic. What we have are a record number of new gun sales and owners over the past few years which has translated into more guns (and) less violent crime.

“It is time for people like Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton to admit that guns save lives,” he told the Free Beacon. It was essentially a replay of statements he made during last weekend’s conference, covered by this column.

By some estimates, as many as 12.5 million Americans are licensed to carry. In Washington State, for example – where SAF and CCRKBA are headquartered – at the end of 2013, there were 392,784 active concealed pistol licenses. That number rose to 449,532 on Jan. 2, 2014, and on Jan. 2 of this year, the number had climbed higher, to 478,584. It’s a trend that reflects what is happening across the country.

Yesterday, the Department of Licensing advised Examiner that Washington is fast approaching the half-million mark, with 499,341 active CPLs. If the trend continues, by the middle of this month there should be more than 500,000 legally-licensed Evergreen State citizens.

Contrast that to the national FBI crime data over the past couple of years. According to the latest statistics, released earlier this week, 2014 saw a total of 8,124 firearms-related homicides, down from the 2013 figure of 8,454 gun-related slayings and down even farther from the 8,855 reported for 2012 by the agency.

This is not meant to correlate the decline in homicides to the concurrent growing number of licensed Americans, or even licensed Washingtonians, but it does suggest strongly that more guns and more concealed carry do not produce the slaughter that the gun prohibition lobby has continually predicted. They will argue that Second Amendment advocates are fibbing, but they can’t really say the FBI is fudging the numbers for the benefit of the firearms community.

It’s data the gun prohibitionists cannot exploit, as Gottlieb intimated to the Free Beacon. He’s not the only leading gun rights advocate who has discussed such exploitation recently, either.

Tuesday’s Seattle Times ran an Op-Ed from Chris Cox, head of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action. He noted that, in the aftermath of the on-air slaying of a Virginia broadcast journalist and her cameraman in August, anti-gunners quickly tried to exploit the tragedy by demanding additional gun laws, even before a suspect had been identified.

There were knee-jerk calls for “expanded background checks,” but as it turned out, the killer had passed a background check to purchase a gun. Indeed, passing background checks seems to be a pattern among high-profile killers.

Proponents of so-called “universal background checks” have now taken to arguing that, shucks, we know background checks won’t stop every mass killer. That’s an understatement. The kind of law they promote so far wouldn’t have stopped any of them.

But Cox touched on something else that readers of this column have known about for a couple of years, because this column first reported about it. There’s a playbook of sorts for anti-gunners called “Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging.” Gottlieb actually stumbled on it while doing research for a project, and Examiner was first with the story.

“In that guide,” Cox succinctly explained, “anti-gun advocates are directed to immediately hit television, Twitter, and Facebook with pleas for more gun control as soon as tragedy strikes. Readers are urged not to wait for the facts to emerge but to push for political advantage while emotions run high.”

Cox also observed, “Most people rightly believe that it’s inappropriate to use a tragedy to push a political agenda moments after the tragedy occurs. But that doesn’t ever seem to stop proponents of gun control.”

Last year, Gottlieb co-authored a book on the subject titled “Dancing In Blood: Exposing the Gun Ban Lobby’s Playbook to Destroy Your Rights.” It was one of the several free books distributed to people attending last weekend’s conference.

The Free Beacon article noted another statistic that has consistently been avoided by the mainstream press, and most assuredly by the gun control crowd. “Rifles were involved in 248 murders last year, fewer than the number committed with knives, blunt objects, and fists or feet. Three percent of gun murders involved rifles,” the story said.

If one peruses the FBI data via the links above, it will become clear that this is a long-term pattern. The number of murders committed with blunt objects or even hands and feet has eclipsed the number of killings with rifles, leading one to wonder why some people demand a ban on so-called “assault weapons.”

In the final analysis, it appears that people like Cox and Gottlieb, and the many advocates attending last weekend’s gathering in Phoenix, may have the facts on their side. But as the gun control campaign has demonstrated time and again, people actually can argue with facts, and get away with it.

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