Violent crime is on the rise in our cities, and if Democrats aren’t careful with their response, they could make a bad situation a whole lot worse.
President Joe Biden met with national and local leaders last month to discuss the spikes in violent crime throughout America’s cities rolling over from the past year. Instead of working with the president and local law enforcement to root out the cause of violence in their cities, politicians are leveraging public panic to continue the pledge made by prominent members of the Democratic Party in the last national election cycle to push for policies that further restrict the right of American citizens to keep and bear arms.
Disarming Americans will likely exacerbate this crisis by making them more vulnerable. Instead of restricting citizens’ abilities to defend themselves, our leaders should make it easier for law-abiding citizens to own and operate firearms throughout the country.
Unfortunately, it’s unlikely we’ll see pro-Second Amendment policies anytime soon. In April, Mayor Lori Lightfoot pleaded with President Biden to institute gun control legislation at the federal level to help quell the bloodshed in the streets of Chicago. Last month Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency in New York to address the rise in violence in the Empire State. Meanwhile, President Biden’s nominee to lead the ATF is a gun control fetishist.
To be fair, these big-city Democrats’ calls for action are understandable. Last year was the most violent year America’s experienced in over two decades, with gun violence claiming more than 19,000 lives.
And America’s inner cities and ethnic minorities got hit the hardest. Chicago had 769 homicides and over 4,000 shooting victims in 2020, and New York City had 462 murders with 1,531 shootings.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans increased 150%. Hundreds of protests throughout the summer of 2020 turned violent resulting in over twenty deaths and causing billions of dollars in property damage. In March of 2021, a gunman shot and killed eight people—six of whom were Asian—in the greater-Atlanta area. Prominent Democrat leaders wasted no time using this tragedy to call for gun control legislation.
Generally speaking, metropolitan areas tend to have higher rates of sexual violence.
Yet, despite the fact that minority communities suffered the most in 2020, and despite the narrative from the left that minorities are perpetually in danger from entrenched systems that prey upon them, progressives somehow still seem to think it’s a good idea to disarm all Americans through legislation that restricts the Second Amendment.
Democratic politicians have been working on legislating additional Second Amendment infringements since March. The House of Representatives passed H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446 to delay the sale of firearms to individuals and to create a national firearms registry. Upon their passage, Senate Democrats expressed their intention to introduce yet another Assault Weapons Ban. None of this will help to reduce violence.
Gun control laws do not reduce violent crime, they just prevent targeted communities from protecting themselves.
Often, the places with the most restrictive gun control laws experience the highest rates of violent crime. Take, for instance, Washington, D.C. In late March of 2021, Mohammad Anwar—a 66-year old Pakistani immigrant—was murdered by two children in a carjacking that has become all too common for the Beltway’s metropolitan area. In one of the country’s cities with the strictest gun laws and a perpetual presence by the National Guard, Mr. Anwar was murdered by children.
The Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994—passed largely as a response to the high crime rates of the 1980s and early-1990s—did not have an impact on reducing violent crime. Naturally, there is little reason to believe that Senator Feinstein’s renewed attack on the Second Amendment will do anything other than preventing people from protecting themselves.
Preventing Americans from owning and accessing firearms puts minority communities in a bad position.
The simultaneous defunding of police departments and the potential restricting of the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights will create a society where the only people with access to consistent protection from the violent whims of the era are the affluent and the powerful.
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