Biden agrees: New laws will not stop future mass shootings

Gee, I wish I had figured that out on my own. Vice President Joe Biden has stepped up and admitted new laws would probably not stop all mass shootings in the future.

Say it isn’t so Joe! Please do read this entire post and share with everyone you know!

“Nothing we’re going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting or guarantee that we will bring gun deaths down to 1,000 a year from what it is now,” Biden told reporters Thursday afternoon after he spent over an hour lunching with Democratic senators at the Capitol.

Nothing that we can do to bring gun deaths down? Well how the hell have we been bringing overall homicide deaths down in the United States for the past 17 years? The total number of homicides – per US Department of Justice figures – was 23,180 in 1993, and about 13,900 in 2010.

Why won’t politicians claim partial victory when it comes to violent crime and murder rates?

I completely understand that 13,900 homicides can not be considered a normal or acceptable figure, but could you imagine a federal government politician who helped to successfully reduced the national debt by 40 percent not going out patting themselves on the back?

That’s an analogy as to what United States has accomplished when it comes to crime. We’ve all worked to reduce the murder rate by 40 percent in the United States. Are you one of the people who claim that figure would be a lot higher if it was not for our improvements in emergency medical care? OK, then let’s look at the overall violent crime rate in the United States between 1992 and 2011.

The overall violent crime rate is down 49 percent from 758 per thousand to 386 per thousand. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of violent crimes that included use of a firearm dropped more than 12 percent.

Yeah Steve, but what about firearm deaths?

Excellent question. Gun control advocates would have you believe more firearms in the hands of the population has greatly increased the number of firearm deaths and injuries, but that is not the case at all. The rate of all gun deaths per 100,000 people has remained steady between 1999 and 2011. Here is a chart from GunPolicy.org, which is hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health at the University of Sydney and has nothing to do with the NRA. (The gun death rate probably is effected by better critical care.)

gun-rate-deaths

Also, the total number of gun deaths in the United States went up 11.4% between 1999 and 2011, but it would be irresponsible to present that number without reference to the gun death rate, which has not changed.

How about the number of guns sold in the USA each year?

That’s actually a difficult question to answer since many sales between private individuals within the same state do not require a background check. We can sort of extrapolate how many sales happen by tracking the number of FBI background checks completed for all new and most used guns. Keep in mind the following:

  • Many background checks are for used firearms.
  • Some background checks come back as “not approved” for a variety of reasons.

The number of background checks between 1999 and 2005 stayed between 8 and 9 million per year, then started to go up in 2006. Between 2005 and 2012, the totals went from 9 to 16.8 million – an increase of 87 percent.

There is zero correlation between the number of guns being purchased and the death rate per 100,000 individuals in the US.

Please inform your friends and family that we are doing an excellent job when it comes to the overall reduction of violent crime. Congratulate the next politician you meet. We do certainly have additional work to do, but we have been going in the right direction.

And how many more guns have been legally purchased in the last decade?

Posted in ,

Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

3 Comments

  1. Plainvillian on February 2, 2013 at 9:45 am

    This falls into the “Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then” category:? Plugs Biden stumbles or staggers into uttering something sensible…… for once.



    • stinkfoot on February 2, 2013 at 12:23 pm

      For his accidental utterance of common sense he will earn a trip to Treasodent Obama’s wood shed…. but I’m sure they’ll mend their fences in a friendly skeet shooting session at Camp Hellfreezesover.



  2. JBS on February 2, 2013 at 10:36 am

    I hear he had a couple too many.
    When Gaffeman says something that makes sense, I pause and, I wait for the other shoe to drop.
    ?
    Especially about guns.
    ?
    This has to be a sop to gun owners and the 2nd Amendment supporters.
    ?



square-joe-biden

The website's content and articles were migrated to a new framework in October 2023. You may see [shortcodes in brackets] that do not make any sense. Please ignore that stuff. We may fix it at some point, but we do not have the time now.

You'll also note comments migrated over may have misplaced question marks and missing spaces. All comments were migrated, but trackbacks may not show.

The site is not broken.