The inaccurate claim Piers Morgan threw at me while a guest on the August 13 airing of Piers Morgan Live provides a teachable moment for everyone in the gun control debate.
During the segment in which I appeared, Morgan countered my contention that more guns have equaled less crime in Virginia by saying that Virginia had the “highest murder rate in the country” in 2009, according to “FBI statistics.”
This statement was blatantly false, and after Newsbusters, the NRA, Breitbart News, and others corrected him, Morgan apologized on August 15 via tweeter and on his show. He admitted he had “wrongly stated Virginia had the highest murder rate in 2009” when it didn’t.
This is a teachable moment, because this is what rabid gun control proponents are prone to do–to argue from emotion rather than reason and throw out numbers that have no basis in reality. This is what conservatives and 2nd Amendment supporters of all political stripes are up against when they stand up for gun rights.
Morgan was not only wrong, he was damn wrong. For not only was Virginia not the state with the number one murder rate in 2009, it was actually 25 on the FBI’s list.
Morgan was so eager to prove more guns do not equal less crime that he throw out a state with a murder rate of 4.4 per-100,000 inhabitants while the rate in other states and/or districts was literally five times that much.
The problem is, many of the other states and/or districts did not fit his criteria of too little gun control, so he could not mention them.
In Virginia in 2012, there was a 16 percent increase in gun sales over the previous year, and this was accompanied by a five percent drop in crime. As Cam Edwards and I discussed on NRA programming on August 15, if the goal of gun control proponents really is the safety of citizens, shouldn’t they be happy that more guns have meant less crime Virginia?
Shouldn’t Piers Morgan be happy as well?
This is a teachable moment.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.
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