’60 Minutes’: Data Showing More Guns, Less Crime an ‘Alternative Fact’

During the February 11 airing of 60 Minutes, host Steve Kroft suggested data showing more guns equal less crime is simply one of numerous “alternate facts.”

He was intimating that pro-Second Amendment facts exist, but those facts are often dispelled by anti-Second Amendment facts.

Of course, this is not how facts work. Instead, there is what is true and what is false, and facts distinguish the former from the latter.

For instance, Democrats rail against AR-15s and AK-47s as the weapon of choice for miscreants, but unvarnished FBI stats show over four times more people were stabbed to death in 2016 than were shot and killed with rifles of any kind.

Democrats contend that gun control makes us safer, but Colorado adopted universal background checks, a “high capacity” magazine ban, and other gun controls in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack only to witness two high profile shootings in 2015 and ten officers shot since December 31, 2017.

Moreover, gun control proponents like Piers Morgan rage against the number of guns Americans can legally buy, implying that more guns equal more crime. But a Congressional Research Service report shows that as private gun ownership expanded from 192 million firearms in 1994 to 310 million firearms in 2009, crime fell sharply. 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.

There are not “alternative facts” in play. Rather, there are facts versus claims that cannot be bolstered.

The same is true for concealed carry reciprocity. Concealed permit holders are among the most law-abiding of law-abiding citizens. On May 27, 2017, Breitbart News reported a Crime Prevention Research Center study showing that from January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2007, the yearly rate of misdemeanors and felonies by full-time police officers was .102 percent. On the other hand, the yearly rate for Texas’s concealed carry permit holders in the year 2015 -– the year campus carry was signed into law in that state–was .0102 percent.

Again, these are just facts.

So when national reciprocity is pushed as a way to help the common man defend himself, with claims that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens in more places will reduce crime, the onus is on the opposing side. And the victory goes to the side with the facts, not to the bearer of “alternative facts” (whatever they are).

 

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.