This is why we need strict gun control, now!

**Posted by Phineas

"Guys like me love gun control!"
“Guys like me love gun control!”

So we can be just like gun-banning Chicago:

Chicago has logged its 500th homicide of 2012.

The last time the city reached the 500-homicide mark was in 2008, when the year ended with 512 killings. Last year, city records show Chicago had 435 homicides.

On Thursday, officials with the Chicago Police Department said the city was one homicide away from the 500 mark. Hours later, a 40-year-old man was fatally shot in the Austin neighborhood on the city’s West Side. Police say Nathaniel Jackson was found on the sidewalk outside a convenience store with a gunshot wound to the head late Thursday.

See how much good gun control does?

Meanwhile, college drop-out Jesse Jackson (1) tried desperately to defend Chicago’s gun ban:

Jackson was asked to defend Chicago’s gun ban, given the staggering rates of gun violence in America’s cities compared to other areas that do not have such strict gun laws and experience less gun violence.

β€œI think about Newtown, for example, they have three or four gun ranges. There are no gun ranges in Chicago,” Jackson replied. β€œNewtown is so different than the complexity of the urban crisis.”

β€œ40 percent unemployment does matter,” Jackson continued. β€œLack of education does matter.” He said that gun crime and joblessness are inextricably linked.

Jackson was asked again, given Chicago’s gun violence in spite of its strict gun laws, how even stricter gun laws can be justified.

β€œThe guns are not coming from Chicago,” Jackson replied. β€œChicago is in a bubble as the manufacturer β€” we’re a target market for gun flow. And they exploit the poverty and the pain.”

β€œIt’s not gun violence. It’s also poverty and lack of education and lack of dreams, where people think killing is the only way out,” Jackson concluded. β€œThis is the need for an urban policy of reconstruction.”

That’s pure Grade-A Great Society syrup there, ladled on thick. Trouble is, it deftly ignores some salient questions, such as that asked by Internet satirist Dave Burge, aka Iowahawk:

And a further observation about civilized, urbane, liberal gun-banning Chicago versus knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, gun-fetishist Texas:

Hmmm… Maybe the answer to Jackson’s “lack of dreams” isn’t to ban guns and set up a national “urban policy” (because the last one worked so well), but to allow people to defend those dreams and their lives. Failing that, perhaps the good people of Chicago should consider moving to Texas and leaving that gun-free paradise to its fate.

The simple fact is that strict gun-control does not work, nor do gun buy-backs (PDF). Chicago isn’t the only example. Great Britain in 1997 instituted a nearly total ban on handguns after the Dunblane school massacre, and the results have been awful:

The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

Gun control in the UK was first instituted under the 1920 Firearms Act, not, as one might think, to control “gun violence,” but out of fear of Bolshevik revolution. In spite of successively more restrictive measures, culminating in the 1997 confiscation of handguns, crime in Britain has gotten worse since 1954. (And it hasn’t stopped.)

While many gun-control advocates are barely concealed statist gun-grabbers who spit on our natural right to self-defense, I’ve no doubt that many others are sincerely moved by the horror such incidents as Sandy Hook, Dunblane, or Port Arthur and want to do something, anything to never let it happen again. But legislating based on emotion rarely leads to good results, as the history of gun control shows.

As Dan Mitchell likes to say, “Bad government policy leads to more bad government policy.” If the previous gun-control law didn’t work the answer must be even-tighter regulations meant to discourage ownership, the inevitable destination of which is outright confiscation or its equivalent — “the Obamacare of gun control.”

And then we can all be just like Chicago.

Footnote:
(1) I have too much respect for genuinely good priests and ministers to grant that snake-oil salesman the title of “Reverend;” I don’t care what box of Cracker Jacks he found it in.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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