Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.It's obvious why people think that. Propaganda works.
In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.
The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found....
Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.
May 8, 2013
"Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s..."
".... including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show."
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Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.
Not surprising when the media hammers the evil gun 24/7.
I remember the year of the shark when a few high profile shark attacks had people convinced Jaws was sitting offshore every beach waiting for the dinner bell.
Doesn't hurt that we have the poorest excuse for a news media in the western world.
The huge drop in crime in the last two decades is an amazing story of success for our society, but good news just has no juice. I've exposed people to this fact a number of times over the years, and it floats like a lead balloon. Either people don't believe you, or it's a big "that's nice".
Now if tell people something negative like "broken toes are increasing dramatically across the country", they will pass it around like the plague.
It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up.
Says the media.
The exponential growth of firearms in America has seen a corresponding decrease in violent crime.
The left are completely ignoring this and frankly looking wacky by pursuing this bizarre "background check at gun shows" bill obsessively.
Note from the Washington Post:
Less than 1 percent of state prison inmates who possessed a gun when they committed their offense obtained the firearm at a gun show, the report said.
The left has absolutely no credibility on guns.
None.
What glenn said.
The news media beileves in parroting left wing talking points rather than doing some actual work and reporting the truth.
Note that from 1998 to April 2013, the FBI has conducted more than 169 million gun purchase background checks.
Also note: in the last 25 years, the number of concealed carry permits issues has gone up by over 5 million.
The left has no credibility on guns.
None.
Ain't that sumptin'?
And as private gun ownership increased.
Fox Butterfield is that you?
The number of guns in circulation has gone up significantly, the number of concealed carry permits has gone up by over 5 million, yet the crime rate keeps going down.
Liberal claims regarding guns have no credibility.
Unexpectedly!
Clueless liberal: "Why are prisons so crowded if crime is down?"
The same logic applies to everything.
In other words, there is no logic. Just feeling.
The drop in crime has very little to do with "hero gun owners" compared to locking up the thugs for longer stretches, the "Roe Effect" of aborting excess inner city blacks.
There have been huge leaps in technology that allow citizens to report or capture imagery of crimes in progress. And databases that better sort out that info flow.
And newcoming immigrants have tended not to have the same rate of crime against person as American blacks.
Clueless liberal: "Why are prisons so crowded if crime is down?"
I look at blog on local crime and they have tracked specific burglars as they go in and out of the system rapidly and as soon as they get out they go on a burglary spree.
"The drop in crime has very little to do with "hero gun owners""
As usual, you miss the the entire point, as you rush to scuff the shoes of some perceived undeserving hero. You really have a blind spot with that crap.
It's the Fox Butterfield Effect:
"Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction"
...now...
"Gun crime plunges despite spread of concealed-carry laws."
Observer bias is a major factor in all sorts of "problems".If the media ain't obsessing about it it can't be a problem.If they are obsesing about it it is a problem.See AGW,subprime lending,womens rights in Islamic countries.US.casualties in GWOT,the self-radicalized,etc.
Clearly this is a crisis that demands massive legislation be jammed through congress without even reading it.
C4D: The drop in crime has very little to do with "hero gun owners"
You're much better -- or at least more amusing -- when exposing Bilderbergers and Keeping a Brother Down than when flogging transparent, leaden straw men.
the "Roe Effect" of aborting excess inner city blacks.
That's funny.
And racist.
The exponential growth of firearms in America has seen a corresponding decrease in violent crime.
Correlation is not causation. Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis). Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.
Freder Frederson said...
Correlation is not causation
Nobody said it was.
But of course by attacking straw men you get to ignore that silly, aburd, over the top claims of 'It will be the wild, wild, west' by people like you have not come to pass.
Samuel Colt smiles.
Freder Frederson said...
Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.
Complete and utter bullshit.
Yes freeper, those dumb yokels you mock endlessly have big piles of cash sitting around to keep buying guns.
Really, they do.
PS: Feb 25 (Reuters) - U.S. gun makers are aiming for record quarterly sales as first-time buyers, including a growing number of women and pensioners, rush to buy weapons before anticipated gun-control laws come into force.
PPS: Across the country, firearms industry analysts point to soaring numbers -- including first-time gun buyers now making up a quarter of all sales and nearly 75 percent of gun retailers reporting sales boosts over last year
You have no credibility on guns.
None.
Zero.
So you should probably shut up now.
Just a guess, but I'll bet crime rates have also dropped where lead exposure was minimal before. I can accept it was a factor, but it smells of a desperate attempt to find an "acceptable" cause. I don't deny it's possible, but the left has jumped on this like it's the entire story from the moment someone came up with it.
We're a low-information society.
Oh look!
Over the past four years, gun store owners reported a 73 percent jump in that customer base, as well as an 83 percent increase in personal defense firearms sales to women.
Here is the part where freeper responds with polls.
As if polls are more meaningful than sales information.
Wow, Freder, talk about leading with your jaw...
freeper lives in an America where poor, dumb, Republican hillbilly's own 10 guns.
That's funny.
Tiger at 10:33
Obviously a reader of the WSJ's Beat of the Web column. You can bet this will be a "Foxx..is that you?" item today!
Freder Frederson said...
The exponential growth of firearms in America has seen a corresponding decrease in violent crime.
Correlation is not causation. Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis). Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.
This is an unmitigated lie. You know this. Unless you've owned a gun, fired a gun, held a gun, or been within 2 feet of one, you know nothing about guns or gun ownership. STFU.
furious_a said...
Wow, Freder, talk about leading with your jaw...
Yeah, well that's what happens when your underbite is five feet long.
It must be because -- thanks to Joycelyn Elders -- we now have safer guns and safer bullets.
For anyone interested on the silly "black aborted babies reduced crime" claim, here is a roundup of some of the research on the subject.
@Methadras/
Picky, picky, picky... :)
C4D doesn't really believe it, he just likes saying "...aborted excess inner city blacks."
Jay said...
the "Roe Effect" of aborting excess inner city blacks.
That's funny.
And racist.
--------------------
That "Freanokomics" correlation has deeply vexed social scientists since it was presented as a correlative cause and effect. It apparantly has truth in looking at inner city career criminal families, and how abortion has cut down on number of live births expected to also be criminals and thugs.
Naturally, the Right to Life goobers HATE the idea and call it racist and an inner city "genocide". Inner city residents commenting thugh, say there are enough thugs already making their lives hell, and if "Roe" results in less thugs - that's a good thing!
As for having a high degree of skepticism of gun lovers claiming more gun owners are the prime factor that caused the drop in crime....no one that has looked at the crimerate drops believes that. At best, a small "risk" factor for career criminals, and at best, like Roe, a lethal way for inner city people to kill excess thugs.
Along this line Ann Coulter had a recent excellent column about the MSM's coordinated campaign of character assassination of John Lott ("More Guns Less Crime--the only man in America that took the time to compile gun crime stats from every county in America) in describing him as "discredited" at every chance available when in fact his methodology has been overwhelmingly upheld by almost every statistician (save for those who thought he underplayed the results) save only for a single lefty idiot whose defenders have even had to admit he was overreaching.
Freder said: Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis).
Looks inversely proportional to global warming to me.
* * *
This nugget is interesting:
The bureau also looked into non-fatal violent crimes. Few victims of such crimes -- less than 1% -- reported using a firearm to defend themselves.
"Few" is 235,700. From the Department of Justice source:
In 2007-11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the
victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender (table
11). This amounted to approximately 1% of all nonfatal
violent victimizations in the 5-year period.
Furthermore:
A small number of property
crime victims also used a firearm in self defense (103,000
victims or about 0.1% of all property victimizations)
It is a standard talking point on the left to entirely dismiss the use of a firearm for self-defense. This is why gun control advocates can freak about AR-15s while offering a mealy-mouthed exception for hunting rifles.
When you consider the number of gun owners and the likelihood a gun owner has access to a gun in event of an attack, 1% is a meaningful number. 2% would be even better.
Henry,
added to that DOJ information would be those who never reported to law enforcement that they used a gun defensively.
...but Americans think [gun crime] it's up, says study.
All Americans? Most Americans? Some Americans? Maybe it's that putative "90% of Americans."
What matters is that with pervasiveness of guns in our society, there has not been a corresponding increase in acts of involuntary exploitation where a gun was involved.
That said, when special interests in our society (e.g. government) give up their Arms, then we can agree that Arms are not needed to maintain the peace. Of course, the criminals will do what criminals by definition do: ignore proscriptive laws, then the experiment will fail because it is irreconcilable with the terms and circumstances of reality.
Another nugget: The five-year period reports 374,300 rapes. In the vast majority of cases, the assailant did not use a firearm. One assumes that the assailant used some other weapon or simple physical size to overwhelm the victim.
Think of how easy it would be for a firearm-carrying woman to stop such a thug.
"Correlation is not causation."
True. And while it's not possible to use that correlation to say *why* violent crimes are down, it is still possible to say with certainty that where there isn't even correlation (more guns-more crime) there absolutely IS NOT causation (more guns-more crime).
"Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis)."
That's an intriguing idea, actually.
"Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns."
Declined from when? It's possible, I suppose, that at some point in the past a greater total proportion of citizens owned at least one firearm, but if it went down before it almost has to be going up now. Yes, of course, people who have guns are buying more guns, but there is too much data on people buying guns for the first time or women (who's partner may have guns) getting their own for the number to still be going down.
"Think of how easy it would be for a firearm-carrying woman to stop such a thug."
I wouldn't use the word *easy* but at least it goes of "give up and hope he doesn't kill you when he's done" to "an even fighting chance."
This mostly about demographics and birth rates as detailed in Freakonomics.
@Synova -- Well rephrased.
The point being that firearms neutralize the advantages of size.
There's an old newspaper trick that they used on slow news weeks. They would simply print everything on the police blotter that would normally be ignored, and run a big black headline: CITY IN GRIP OF CRIME WAVE. Comparing the phony crime wave to the equally phony NATION IN GRIP OF GUN TERROR seems like more of the same, but the motives are different. While the "crime wave" was just a silly ploy to sell papers, the "gun terror" is part of a larger and more sinister scheme to deprive us of our rights.
Frederson - Don't look now. Gallup: Self-Reported Gun Owership the Highest since 1993.
The lead exposure - violent crime theory is intrigues me. Sranger things have happened.
Roe Effect.
The lap dog media gets to piddle in our laps.
Can we just put to rest the "gun crime" nonsense? Now? Once and for all?
Why should anyone care about "gun" crime, or "gun" murders, as opposed to crime-crime and murder-murders?
Dadvocate at 2:47
Look at the trends, particularly women and people in the east. Interesting where the sales are being made.
Just think of what Organizing For Action will be able to accomplish.
What is the percentage of prison inmates to the general population now and in the mid 90s?
Freder Frederson said...
People who own guns are just buying more guns.
No. We are just LYING to pollsters more often. That's why their recent 90% figure turned out to so much hot air.
I lied to 3 pollsters today. You can always tell from the question what the desired answer is. So you give the opposite.
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