Virginia: Gun Crime Drops As Gun Sales Soar

by William Teach | August 6, 2013 8:53 am

Well, who could have seen this coming.

[1]

(Fox News[2]) Amid calls nationwide for stricter gun control laws, Virginia is experiencing a unique trend: the state’s gun-related crime is declining but firearms sales are increasing.

Firearms sales rose 16 percent to a record 490,119 guns purchased from licensed gun dealers in 2012, according to sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

During the same period, major crimes committed with firearms dropped 5 percent to 4,378.

“This appears to be additional evidence that more guns don’t necessarily lead to more crime,” said Thomas R. Baker, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who specializes in research methods and criminology theory.

“It’s a quite interesting trend given the current rhetoric about strengthening gun laws and the presumed effect it would have on violent crimes,” Baker told the newspaper. “While you can’t conclude from this that tougher laws wouldn’t reduce crime even more, it really makes you question if making it harder for law-abiding people to buy a gun would have any effect on crime.”

Correct, we can’t necessarily conclude that the drop in violent crime is directly linked the large increase in gun sales, but we can sure infer it.

The original article is from the Richmond Times Dispatch[3], which notes

But Josh Horwitz, the leader of a national gun-control group, does not find the comparison of gun crime to legal gun sales particularly significant, and views any perceived correlation between the two sets of data as essentially meaningless.

“Guns sold incident to a background check are less likely to be involved in crimes than guns sold without a background check,” said Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “So the real question – which I don’t think we really know – is what’s the level of gun sales without a background check?

Horowitz inadvertently makes a great point: if government wants to go after guns, then it should go after criminals with guns, not curtail the 2nd Amendment rights of law abiding citizens, which is what Obama, Bloomberg, Horowitz, his group, and all these other liberal groups are pushing. The vast majority of guns are sold legally and with a background check amongst law abiding citizens. Criminals do not bother.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove[4]. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach[5].