On February 7, a 73-year-old woman in Waterville, Maine, woman was raped in her home. Police Chief Joe Massey described it as one of those incidents that reminds you that “a gun in the hand is better than someone on the phone telling you police are on their way.”
According to the Portland Press Herald, the woman awoke “to a loud bang shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday and was confronted by a man dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and armed with what appeared to be a handgun.” The man marched her to the bedroom, where he “put a pillow case over her head [and] sexually assaulted her. He then pistol whipped her. “The woman suffered multiple bruises from the beating and was later hospitalized.”
Chief Massey was “disturbed” by the violence and brutality involved in the attack, and he said it proves “there are monsters living among us” from whom we must defend ourselves. He lamented that the elderly woman did not have a gun, saying, “In cases like this, you wish the homeowner had a weapon and was capable of defending themselves.”
Jeffrey Butts–of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York–described Massey’s wishes that the 73-year-old woman had been armed to defend herself as “typical of the immediate gut reaction to horrific crimes.” Butts said, “It is easy to indulge in the Wild West fantasy that crime would be deterred if we were all armed all the time, and undoubtedly this is true. But far more crimes would be created than prevented by widespread gun ownership.”
Yet in reality, Butts is wrong and empirical evidence proves it.
Breitbart News previously reported a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study which showed that while private gun ownership grew from 192 million firearms in 1994 to 310 million firearms in 2009, the murder rate plummeted. According to the report, the “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate was 6.6 per 100,000 Americans in 1993. Following the exponential growth in the number of guns, that rate fell to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2000. The rate came down as low as 3.2 per 100,000 in 2011 while gun ownership continued to expand.
The demonstrable point of the CRS study–more guns, less crime.
Fortunately–in the case of the Waterville woman who was not armed to defend herself–police were able to arrest 32-year-old Mark Daniel Halle in connection with the attack. He is being held “on felony counts of gross sexual assault, burglary and aggravated assault.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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