A DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) "special report" shows that "firearm-related" homicides fell by 39 percent between 1993 and 2011.
It also showed that violent crime--or "nonfatal firearm-related violent victimization against persons aged 12 or older"--declined by 70% over the same time period.The BJS report was released in May 2013, but was under-reported amid the push for new gun control laws. The information in it is detrimental to many of the gun control arguments which were being propounded at the time.
For instance, while Democrats in various parts of the country were pushing legislation to end the "gun show loophole," the BJS report showed that "among state prison inmates who possessed a gun at the time of [their] offense, less than 2 percent bought their gun at a flea market or gun show."
And a subsection of the report focused on 1997 to 2004 showed that only two percent of state inmates and three percent of federal inmates used "a military-style semiautomatic or fully automatic" in the commission of their crime.
The success of the gun control lobby was evidenced by an LA Times column which ran at the same time as the BJS report. According to the Times, although "gun crime...plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s...few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen."
Violent gun crime has dropped dramatically in the past two decades, but the majority of Americans think it's more of a problem now than ever, according to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the survey, done in March, 56% of Americans believe gun crime is worse today than it was 20 years ago. And 84% believe in recent years, gun crime has either gone up or stayed the same — when the reality is that it has dropped significantly.
The rate of non-fatal violent gun crime victimization dropped 75% in the past 20 years; The gun homicide rate dropped 49% in the same period, according to numbers Pew researchers obtained from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The public doesn't get its feelings out of crime statistics," said Alfred Blumstein, an urban systems professor at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. "The public gets its feelings from particularly notorious events, and what the press talks about."
The survey found that women and the elderly were less likely to be victims of crime, but were more likely to believe gun crime had increased in recent years. Men, who were more likely to be victims, were more likely to know that the gun crime rate had dropped.
Starting in 1993, homicides and robberies began to drop. Blumstein said that was in part due to the decline of the crack cocaine trade, which from 1985 to 1993 fueled a 25% increase in those crimes.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/07/gun-crime-drops-but-americans-think-its-worse/2139421/
Expanded CCW laws probably also helped bring down gun crime. It is much harder to be a criminal when the victims might be armed.
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