Mission statement:

Armed and Safe is a gun rights advocacy blog, with the mission of debunking the "logic" of the enemies of the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms.

I can be reached at 45superman@gmail.com.You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/45superman.

Monday, February 09, 2009

CSGV: Crime is going up, so disarm!

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) president Mike Beard points today to some ominous indicators of rising crime, as a result, presumably, of the economic problems.

Given the severity and depth of the economic crisis in which our country is enmeshed, it is safe to say that we are living in an interesting age. Our great depression is already having an impact on the crime rate in the nation. The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) reports that certain crimes are up across the nation due to the financial crisis. At the same time, our state and local law enforcement agencies are facing severe budget cuts and hiring freezes [pdf file]. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has pointed out to the Washington Post that “cities may have to curtail successful programs that have flooded crime ‘hot spots’ with officers.”
Hmm . . . crime is rising, while police numbers and funding are declining. Sounds like a good reason (for those who needed one) to take greater responsibility for one's safety, and for that of one's family.

Mike apparently doesn't see it that way. He, in fact, considers the Obama-inspired, dramatic, sustained spike in firearm and ammunition sales as an "added factor" in the problem.
An added factor is the recent upturn in gun sales. As one Forth Worth firearms dealer described it: “The volume is 10 times what we ever expected. It started with assault rifles, but at this point, people are buying ammunition, high capacity magazines, Glocks—it’s all flying off the shelf. With the economy the way it is, people are worried about instability. They are scared of civil unrest.”
Concerns about civil unrest, I would say, are not out of place.

Beard then goes on to dismiss concerns that the Obama administration would pursue a gun ban--that they only want to . . . ban the most effective firearms for dealing with civil unrest.
The only ban being contemplated is a renewal of the widely popular 1994-2004 ban on assault weapons.
One question keeps coming to me when contemplating the motivation of the gun prohibitionists: whose side are they on?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They are on their side. They will crush the criminal element if and when they no longer need them to sow fear in the populace.

Until the time when they have weakened the body politic enough to make them ineffective at anything resembling self-reliance they will allow the criminal element almost totally free rein.

It is no accident that of the 20,000 plus gun control laws in the land all of them do more to harm the law-abiding than they do to corral criminality. It is design.

When that design is completed the powers that be will have total control over the lives of every person in the country. Of course,there will be more laws making even disagreement in thought or deed or speech illegal and they will then crush the new criminal element as they will have done by then to the traditionally criminal element of robbers, rapists, killers, etc. That is, except for the ones they hire to crush the "new criminal".

Lovely, ain't it?

the pistolero said...

Leave it up to assclowns like Michael Beard to blame the rise in criminal activity on those who don't actually commit crime...

me said...

Funny last time I looked HR1022 dramatically expanded "assault weapons" 10 fold. Anything introduced now is likely to do the same again. An exponential defining of assault weapons sure seems like a nice way to placate the fudds and the sheep.