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Minority Report Card
by C.D. Michel
http://www.calgunlaws.com/

Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

In its annual publicity stunt "report card," the Brady Campaign released its gun control grades for states. The states that have adopted the most gun control laws promoted by the Brady Campaign get the highest grades. Points are subtracted from states that allow people to use guns for self-defense, and from states where concealed carry licenses are liberally issued.

The report card is a farce. If you want to reduce your chances of being a victim, you should consider avoiding states that the Brady Campaign gives its highest grades. Statistically speaking, the Brady Center’s "more gun control laws are better" policy seems to lead to that end.

Brady Center ranks states by the adoption of laws that Brady and other gun control groups like, not any that have proven to be effective. This use of an undocumented "curve" to adjust their grades is not merely unscientific, it’s shameful. The basic hoax is that gun control laws mean something. So if a law actually kept guns out of the hands of criminals and lunatics, such a gun control score card might have meaning. But as the National Academy of Science has noted, there is no ascertainable correlation between such laws and a reduction in violence.

California was once again at the top of the Brady class, and was graded as the state with most gun control laws in the land. The Brady Campaign’s report card failed to mention that California is graded #16 for violent crime and #18 for homicides. Highly graded Maryland, which takes the #4 spot on the Brady’s gun control wish list, is #9 for violent crimes, #7 for murders and #2 for robbery. Way to go Baltimore! And Brady once again omitted Washington, D.C.— a territory that has laws much stricter than California and has a third world homicide rate (320% of the national average and nearly three times higher than even California). Including the nation’s murder capital would have spiked the Brady’s campaign.

Given the studies showing that gun control laws don’t reduce criminal violence, its little wonder that California’s glorified gun control laws do nothing to reduce rapes. After all, nothing deters a rapist like a snub nose revolver. Because of California’s restrictive gun laws, law abiding California women will have a very tough time getting a license to carry one, a factor that Brady ranks positively. Her would be rapist, however, will have no trouble getting guns on the black market.

Illustrating Brady deception is easy. Just take their rankings, any form of violent crime, then pop them into a scatter diagram and look for correlations (spoiler alert ... you won’t find any).

Take the broadest measure of public mayhem, violent crime. When we place Brady Scores against violent crime rates, we see no correlation what so ever. California’s violent crime rate is nearly identical to Arizona’s. Whereas California is ranked #1 on Brady’s score card, Arizona is ranked last (they scored a minus eight).

The same holds true for murders (California, with a Brady rank of #1, has similar homicide rates with Florida and North Carolina, #26 and #20 respectively).

Perhaps the most interesting crime category is robberies, where Brady laws do appear to affect the level of crime—but not in a way Brady can brag about. States with tough gun control laws encourage robberies—you know, ATM muggings, hot home invasions, and other forms of violent theft. Why? Cause criminals know their prey has been unarmed by the Brady Center’s laws.

The annual Brady State publicity stunt report card should be ignored—by you, by the media, by anyone with cranial blood flow. The scoring system is silly, their rankings have undocumented curve calculations, and the data shows that they have no correlation to public safety—except perhaps for well and easily armed muggers who seem to like the way gun control advocates keep score.

This article is filed in the following categories in the CalGunLaws.com database: Legal Frontlines.