The Media Finally Notices The Decades-Long Drop In Violent Crime, And All It Took Was a Wayne LaPierre Speech

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.

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.

The Daily Beast:

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.

You cannot defend this as anything other than the dangerous ravings of a madman. LaPierre’s description of the world is demonstrably untrue, and not just in concrete, objective terms. To cite just one example: crime rates in the US have been falling for 20 years – a statistic that some gun rights advocates brandish as proof of the selectively defined cliché, “more guns, less crime.” Just as troubling is LaPierre's internal inconsistency about what it means for NRA members to be "on their own".

Perhaps we should file these away and remind them during the next gun control frenzy.

posted by JohnE. at 11:01 AM

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