Violent Crimes at Lowest Level Since 1973

[Thor67]

On Sunday Sept. 10, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released their 2005 report on crime in the U.S. Contrary to what the Boston Globe and other "news" outlets have reported (based on the preliminary large city numbers from FBI), crime is actually down AGAIN. I haven't seen the liberals screaming this from the rooftops.

According to the Dept. of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime and property crime rates are at their lowest levels since 1973!

Here's the brief text:

"Violent crime and property crime rates in 2005, as estimated by BJS's National Crime Victimization Survey, are at the lowest levels recorded since 1973 - the first year that such data were available. The rate of every major violent and property crime measured by the survey fell significantly between 1993 and 2005. The violent crime rate fell 58 percent during that period, and the property crime rate declined by 52 percent. The number of violent crimes decreased from an estimated 11 million in 1993 to 5.2 million in 2005."

Full version can be found at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/cv05pr.htm

Just a quick note to the Boston Globe, Mayor Mumbles, and Mayor Bloomberg . . . Gun ownership and Castle Doctrine laws are up, crime is down. Well, in places other than Boston, and Washington D.C. anyway.

 

[drgrant]

While these numbers are interesting.....

Beware of the poop in the silver lining.

Nowhere does it say anything about how public gun ownership positively
affected the crime rate. There's no firm relationship established by that
data. It would even possible for the antis to cite increased gun control
measures as being partially responsible for the reduction. (not that I agree
with that assertion, but I'm just saying, thats how the antis would spin it.).

It's been shown on numerous occasions that all you can do is be able
to say that public gun ownership has NOT increased or contributed to
crime in any way. (eg, an increase in the overall number of guns and owners
has not lead to an increase in crime). On the other hand it's much
harder to link ownership to a reduction in crime, because crime can be reduced
by about 9000 other factors related to or attached to it. On top of that,
no databases currently track with any notion of accuracy the amount
of times firearms are used defensively, with or without having to
fire a shot. If we had some way of even having a realistic method of
tracking that data, we'd have some better data points.

I'm not saying that such stats are entirely worthless, it's just that they
don't do us much good unless we can draw rock solid conclusions from
the data. Additionally, we have to set ourselves up to still support
ownership even if the numbers don't go our way. Let's use new orleans
as an example... during that window of katrina, the excess guns floating
around may have "led to" more crimes to be committed, but one should still
argue that the general public should not be deprived of the right to defend
themselves, simply because there are people out there that use guns for
nefarious pupouses.

Besides, the antis main ploys are emotional, not factual. They only
spit out "facts" (most of which are misrepresentations or lies) and numerical
figures when they can do so unchallenged, as in a piece of print media or
something. No anti is going to get onstage in a debate and have the whole
"number of children killed by guns" stat torn up and shoved back into their ass by
the opponent in about 5 seconds. Instead, they're going to prattle on about how
someone's baby got killed because of a stray bullet from two drug dealers shooting it out,
or some other emotional sensationalism. That's about all the "facts" they have.
They'll go "wah, remember columbine, wah!" without bothering to let out the fact that
38+ years of heavy gun control have done nothing to stop those kinds of events from
occuring in our country.

The key causes of our losses in america as group are due to media aspersions
of firearms and the general apathy and ignorance of most of the voting
block. We have to get out there and educate the people who simply
don't know any better. There are an awful lot of people carrying around
an antis vote because they simply don't know any better.



-Mike