Gun Ownership has nearly doubled since 1993, yet in the 23 years between then and now, the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that violent crime has fallen 77 percent.
We are not talking about a slight increase in gun ownership. Rather, we are talking about gun ownership surging to the point that the 192 million guns Americans owned in 1994 are approximately 350 million or more guns today. And violent crime decreased sharply.
Fox Business points out that violent crime did see an isolated increase in 2015. But the increase was just “3.4 percent more than in 2014,” which did not even begin to reverse the tide of decades of plummeting violent crime numbers. Case in point: “The 2015 figures are 0.7% below those reported in 2011, but 16.5% lower than a decade ago.”
Fox Business points to the Bureau of Justice Statistics that show “violent crime has plummeted 77% since 1993.” This means there are “18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, compared with 79.8 victimizations … [decades] ago.”
It is important to note that this 77 percent reduction in violent crime correlated with a massive increase in the number of privately owned guns in the United States. Breitbart News reported a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study that showed there were 192 million privately owned guns in the U.S. in 1994, a number that increased to 310 million by 2009. The time frame examined by CRS stopped the year President Obama took office, a year that marked the beginning of a surge in gun-buying that has come to break records month after month during the past year-and-a-half.
For example, the gun-buying surge is so high that more background checks were conducted January 1, 2016, through November 30, 2016, than during any full year in the history of background checks. The FBI shows there were 24,767,514 background checks during those 11 months alone, and this comes after three consecutive years of 20,000,000+ background checks a year.
The point is that 310 million privately owned guns in 2009 have easily grown to 350 million. Still, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that violent crime is down 77 percent since 1993.
More guns have correlated with less crime.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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