Ace:
You may recall during the latest gun control push (and really, all previous ones) that the media routinely ignored a rather important statistical trend: the nation’s steady and dramatic decline in violent crime over the past 40 years. The NRA, of course, mentions this frequently.
Last week, the FBI released its national crime report for 2012. By a slight margin, the nation’s violent crime rate decreased in 2012–relative to 2011–making it the lowest it has been since 1970. Compared to 1991, when it hit an all-time high, violent crime is down by 49 percent. The nation’s murder rate was unchanged in 2012; still lower than any time since 1963 and at nearly an all-time low.
These stats are, shall we say, inconvenient for those in the gun control movement and the media that happily cheerleads for them.
Now let’s fast-forward to this past weekend’s NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. This part of Wayne LaPierre’s speech seems to have rallied the outrage brigade:
We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.
This one sentence quote is apparently all it took for the media to finally notice that the country’s violent crime rate has been falling. Naturally, in an effort to discredit LaPierre.
LaPierre, Young, and their allies give those in the far-right bubble a completely false sense of our world, when in reality crime rates are steadily falling and the threat of terrorism has receded at least somewhat.
LaPierre painted a picture of a dangerous, declining America beset by crumbling values, killers and rapists to argue guns are needed.[…]
There was no mention in LaPierre’s speech of the 20-year decline in violent crime rates in the U.S.
