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Making Life "Brutish, Nasty, and Short"?
by A.X. Perez
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Proponents of gun control and other violations of liberty (indiscriminate phone monitoring, police militarization, and so on) justify their actions as necessary to control crime. It is worth noting that both so called conservatives and so called liberals are guilty of this. I mention this as a reminder that at best any alliance between libertarians and either of these groups is a matter of political convenience not a bond of eternal friendship. A commitment to a single dance, not a commitment to hold hands in the moolight, swap spit, and spend a large chunk of eternity gazing longingly into each others' eyes (Apologies to the script writers of No Mercy).

Since 1994, when the urban crack wars went wild, violent crime rates have declined in the US. This is not a consequence of stricter gun laws but rather a sorting out of who was selling what drugs where and a decline in the demand for certain drugs. Not only that, to be blunt, murder rates are consistently lower in jurisdictions with less restrictive gun laws than more.

When the 1994 Ugly Gun Ban expired people went a little wild buying previously banned guns, they did not go crazy murdering each other.

[This link] lists reasons why violent crime rates have declined in the the last few years. Egregious, and even subtle, violations of 2nd and 4th Amendment rights are not included in this list. Neither is the militarization of police forces (including Federal) or behavior on their part which is making people's lives "brutish, Nasty and short."

For the last decade as murder numbers declined justifiable homicide rates have risen. Interestingly fire arms are used in eighty some percent of justifiable homicides by civilians (not law enforcement), sixty some percent of murders. This does not count the times when the possibility of armed resistance prevents crime.

Disarming people makes them less safe, not safer. and it seems to me that the only crime growing is deliberate violation of the Constitution by Law Enforcement.

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