The Price of Liberty

By Nathan Barton

Ryan McMaken at Mises.org recently discussed an FBI report about declining rates of homicides in the Fifty States. Despite the wave of mass killings in the last 7.5 years (while a certain squatter has been officially in DC), and despite the growing numbers of weapons on the streets, the kill rate is DROPPING. This demonstrates, as the Mises article notes, that the United States has not entered into some sort of horror-movie suicide pact and can only be saved by removing constitutional protections for the God-given right to defend ourselves with firearms and other weapons.

But there are more things to note. There are two charts, one showing that the homicides per 100,000 population have been dropping for the past 25 years and are at the lowest level since 1957: virtually my entire life! The second, though, is equally enlightening. A quick addition indicates that about 130 MILLION “new” guns (manufactured and imported) have been added to American society in the past 20 years (1994-2013). That is almost one for every 2 Americans. And FAR far different from claims that only one out of (take your pick) ten or twenty or fifty American homes have guns. Because when you consider that there were already several hundred million guns privately owned by Americans prior to 1994, there are likely at least one gun PER American found in private hands: add a couple of million in the hands of government employees and military and we are one heavily armed nation. It points out the absurdity of claiming that a state like South Dakota only has 11 guns per 1,000 residents (made on a mainstream media website a few months ago). And yes, I know that many of us have more than one gun: indeed, often large collections. But I also know how many guns just in individual families have been owned by those families for generations and are in NO ONE’s data base. Continue reading →