Yes, I know, drawing conclusions from a one-time event can be dangerous; it could be a statistical blip. But at the very least, this should earn us a moment of silence or two from the people who always predict a bloodbath when gun laws are relaxed:
Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn't rise after the bans were eliminated -- they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.
The story notes that Chicago Mayor Richard Daly, before the lifting of that city's gun ban, predicted that we "would go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun, and we'll settle it in the street." The Wild West is one of those American myths that won't die -- it started in dime novels and was perpetuated by scores of Hollywood movies. What we know now was also true back then: An armed society is a polite society:
I thought it might be informative to look at the reality of crime in the “wild west” cattle towns and compare them to the peaceful streets of such eastern, gun-control paradises as DC, New York, Baltimore and Newark.
In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, author W. Eugene Hollon, provides us with these astonishing facts:
- In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.
- In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.
I'm not sure how valid the comparison to the East is. That part of the country was much more populated and tightly packed and with a lot more wealth, which might have had something to do with the gun violence; besides, I'm not exactly sure that the East was quite the "gun control paradise" that is claimed.
But you could look all day in vain trying to find evidence of the West as a dangerous, violent place with guns a blazin' and innocent citizens shot dead in the streets. The bad guys tended to shoot at each other and back and officers of the law, not at random bystanders.
