— Which, as it happens, turns out to be a promise for insanity, if we buy the colloquial definition of insanity as repeating the same action over and over and over again and expecting different results.

From Extrano’s Alley, in November of 2012:

Thanks to a link at The Gun Wire, I see the “New York Times” has an unsigned op-ed titled ‘Promises on Gun Control.’

I will not quote it, other to observe that it could have have been pulled from the Time’s 1968 editorial pages. Then as now, the Times is heavy on “the scourge of gun violence in this country,” and light on anything like research, investigation, or facts to back opinion.

So let’s light a candle to pierce the darkness of ignorance. The United States has had four, and apparently now we have a fifth, major gun control drives.

1.) An effort to stop concealed carry, circa 1905, resulting from labor violence.

2.) An effort to stop rumrunners and criminal gangs from killing each other, circa 1913, that was reinforced by post World War I fears “unemployed soldiers would turn to crime.”

3.) An effort to kill guns in revenge for the paid political assassination of President Kennedy, circa 1964, and subsequently.

4.) An effort to ban self-loading and slide action firearms, culminating in the passage of the “Brady Bill” in 1993.

5.) In the last 36 months anti-gun organizations have put up more than a million dollars a month to push gun control.

— Keep in mind, all of this was prior to Sandy Hook, suggesting to me that the ghoulishly ramped-up push for gun-grabbing measures targeting law-abiding gun owners in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, which took place in a government-mandated “gun free zone” (a fact that apparently wasn’t lost on Adam Lanza, who targeted the school because he knew he’d meet with the least amount of resistance while tallying most kills), was entirely and rather reprehensibly opportunistic.

If you can stand the mental image, picture Michael Bloomberg popping a boner at the first word of the mass killing of elementary school children.  Or if you think that too unfair, picture him immediately grieving for the horrors of the mass killing of innocents, then popping a boner, having realized that he and the national Democrats now had a crisis moment window through which to push anti-2nd Amendment measures that they’ve long desired.

If you can’t stand the image, well, apologies.  But that doesn’t make it any less true.

Geoff B sends along the following chart — an annotated version of the chart that appears in the original post at Extrano’s Alley:

Extrano’s alley, cont:

[…] let’s review what we have:

1.) The first State gun laws sent the National homicide rate soaring from 1.2 to 4, and eventually to 5 per 100,000 population. Some relaxation of those laws in 1909 and 1910 resulted a small reduction in murder and violent crime rates. A reduction that was more than reversed by the additional crime resulting from New York’s Sullivan Law.

2:) General tightening of State and local gun laws during the Prohibition era sent homicide rates to above 10 per 100,000 just before the end of prohibition. The Depression resulted in far fewer police officers, some relaxation of gun laws, and an increase in persons carrying. By 1938 the sight of citizens carrying a gun under a suit coat on Chicago’s Loop was surprisingly common. And the violent crime and homicide rates responded as they always do when citizens appear better able to defend themselves – by declining.

3:) The gun control drive that began in late 1963 was ostensibly as revenge for the death of President John F. Kennedy at the hands of a gun. The upturn in homicide rates beginning in 1964 is distinct, and unmistakable. The spectacular rise in homicide rates, and of violent crime rates, is typical of that following restrictive gun laws.

4:) From the early 1970?s until the mid 1980?s, the general trend was to soften existing gun laws. For one important factor, ammunition registration was eliminated, followed by a sharp decline in homicide rates. However, in the mid-1980?s the drive to ban repeating firearms of all sorts began, reaching a peak in 1991. The tabular results of that drive can be seen here with the official death toll a staggering 24,700 homicides.

The homicide and violent crime rates began to decline in 1992, as States began to institute Concealed Carry Weapons permit systems and other gun related laws were relaxed. Since the peak of gun control mania in 1991, Americans have purchased more than 150 million new guns – and the homicide violent crime rate has declined by 49 percent, from 758.1 per 100,000 to just 386.3 per 100,000.

Now, turning our attention to the slower to react violent crime rates, changes in methodology in the late 1940?s and 1950?s make a direct comparison of violent crime and property crime rates difficult. Just the change in the definition of grand larceny, from $50 to $500, creates a “changeless change” problem that would take several days to properly account for. As a result, the chart covering violent crime starts in 1960.

[…]

[…] before there was such a thing as a regularly enforced gun control law, our overall crime rate was just 0.4 percent – or 396 per 100,000 population.

At the beginning of the 1964 gun control drive, after 59 years of gun controls, our overall crime rate was 2.2 percent or 2,180.3 per 100,000 population.

In 1991, at the peak of gun control mania, our overall crime rate was 5.9 percent, or 5,897.8 per 100,000 population.

In 2011, after twenty years of gradually softening gun control laws, our overall crime rate was 3.3 percent, or 3,295.0 crimes reported to the police per 100,000 population.

Similar results in every variety of crime, including violent crime, are on the record.

Not only in the United States, where the crime victimization rate is 3.3 percent and the violent crime rate is 0.39 percent, but in England, where the crime victimization rate is 36.5 percent and the violent crime rate is 4.2 (4,156.6 per 100,000) percent. Poland, where the crime victimization rate is 12.5% and the violent crime rate is 1.26%. And on and on almost endlessly.

I have data demonstrating the failure of gun control to “control crime” on 22,420 gun control laws, and I have partial data on 17 more. All of these have had a single result. More crime, more violence, more murder. And equally importantly, more political repression.

So the promise of gun control is simple enough. Gun control promises far higher crime, violence, and murder numbers and rates. Along with political repression in the bargain.

There is nothing good in gun control. And there is nothing good in those who describe the United States as awash in gun violence. Because the relaxed gun laws the unnamed New York Times writer fears so much have cut our crime rates, our violent crime rates, and our murder rates in half in just twenty years.

Over the vehement and often violent opposition of gun control organizations, such as the New York Times. Organizations with blood on their hands.

Add to the New York Times the cynical, politically-opportunistic (or else politically craven) state legislatures in many Democrat-controlled states — some of which already boast some of the highest gun crime rates in the nation — who are attempting to ram through gun control measures on a party-line basis, and it is clear that the object here is not to reduce “gun violence” or violent crime or even protect children or woman or the elderly (else why maintain deadly turkey shoot “gun-free zone” restrictions and push for campus bans on CCW?).

The object is control.  And as part of a long-term strategy to secure that control, the left (and some on the statist right) have begun a campaign to criminalize erstwhile legal behavior, demonize gun owners, and create cross-referenced databases that will flag  vaguely (and subjectively) defined “mental health” risks for either confiscation of firearms or denial of the right to obtain them in the first place.  The object of which is to increase the number of background-check denials and “lawful” confiscations.

Couple this to “common sense” high-cap magazine bans that include provisions demanding, upon the death of the original owner, confiscation or destruction of magazines that are grandfathered in — in what amounts to property theft granted the imprimatur of legitimacy because the thief is government — and you can begin to see the contour of the progressive longwar toward an incremental gutting of the 2nd Amendment.

The resounding irony being that if  you dare resist, you become a criminal.  And we’re all in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, are we not?

Why, that’s just common sense…

(thanks to geoff B)

****

nb:  as Geoff notes in his email to me, he is convinced of the OP’s expertise thanks to articles like these.  I urge you to explore the site.  Lots of facts right at your fingertips.