Based on the percent of firearms licenses, about 1 to 5 percent of adult residents had a firearms license in Massachusetts counties. But Iwama found no consistent effect of the new legislation on reducing four types of violent crime (murder or nonnegligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, robbery, rape). Her study did find that a one-percent increase in denied firearm licenses and denied firearm licenses following statutory disqualifications increased robberies 7.3 and 8.9 percent, respectively.

While the percentage of denied firearms licenses and firearms license applications had little to no effect on violent crimes, Iwama suggests state lawmakers revisit their legislation to ensure that it is being implemented as intended and address challenges identified. In particular, are these findings the result of a longer-than-expected lag in enforcement following passage of the legislation? Are they due to individuals obtaining firearms in nearby states with looser gun laws? Or is it possible that the 2014 law is being enforced differentially by county?

Natasha Abel
October 22, 2021
Study: Massachusetts Gun-Control Legislation Has Had No Effect on Violent Crime
[Or is it possible that what I and others have been saying, for almost 20 years, gun control has not and will not make the general public safer?

Study after study agrees with me but researcher Janice Iwama confirms the findings of dozens of other researchers using data from all over the country (for example: a 2018 study on background checks and my thoughts on background checks in 2013) and concludes it must be an implementation problem specific to Massachusetts. She doesn’t understand (or believe) that it was never the intention of the law to increase public safety.—Joe]

The ATF maintained in its response to the 2021 investigation that the “sole purpose” of its database and ongoing efforts to digitize out-of-business records “is to trace firearms used in crimes.”

More than half-a-million traces were performed in 2021, according to the ATF, and just under half a million in 2020. The ATF, however, says it does not have the ability to determine if the database actually helps solve crimes. The ATF’s National Tracing Center “has no ability to determine the successful prosecution of hundreds of thousands of crime gun traces it completes annually, nor does it have any way to link a trace for a specific prosecution for a particular year,” the agency informed Congress.

Adam Kredo
January 31, 2022
Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales
[There are number of things of interest in this:

1. One billion gun sales!
2. The ATF says they can’t even tell us if there has ever been a single crime solved via the tracing of a gun.
3. Yet they continue to do a half million gun traces per year – to what purpose?

If the nearly sole purpose was to return stolen property to its rightful owner and they were successful most of the time I would wouldn’t complain too loudly.

If they were instrumental in solving hundreds of thousands of violent and/or property crimes every year I wouldn’t complain too loudly.

Neither of those two scenarios are true.. All evidence indicates the ATF are the criminals.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

We would urge that you consider rescinding the proposed regulation that would require FFLs to preserve firearm records older than 20 years. Indeed, the evidence provided by ATF thus far demonstrates that such records likely have little utility in prosecuting crime, yet raise serious concerns about whether ATF is creating a prohibited national gun registry.

Congress of the United States
Signed by 36 members of Congress
Letter from Congress to the ATF
[See also:

• Lawmakers Investigate Biden Admin Over Database Containing One Billion Gun Sale Records (freebeacon.com)
• Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly One Billion Gun Sales (freebeacon.com)
• Biden Admin Lays Foundation For Massive Gun-Grab Exercise, 1 Billion Records Of Gun Sales (tampafp.com)

We live in interesting times. Prepare accordingly.—Joe]

With violent crime increasing over the last two years, Americans want a solution. But President Joe Biden constantly frames violent crime as only a gun problem. Again, it was the sole focus of Biden’s speech in New York City on Thursday. Even when he mentions police or prosecutors, it was in terms of enforcing gun control laws.

But this “guns first” approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. And while Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically.

John R. Lott
February 4, 2022
Biden’s ‘guns first’ approach to violent crime ignores basic facts
[I’m reminded of the television news several decades ago. When they would report on crime an symbol of a handgun would appear in the corner of the screen during the crime report. It didn’t matter if was burglary, a stabbing, or shoplifting and no gun was involved. They were attempting to make guns synonymous with crime.

The democrats defund the police, fail to prosecute criminals, and then tell us they are going to increase restrictions on firearms. This isn’t stupidity or ignorance. This is evil. As I have said before, this the communist way.

Prepare appropriately.—Joe]

Proponents of these laws, and especially the gun control initiatives passed in recent years, sold the public a bill of goods, and now everybody knows it. Voters were told in 2014 that Initiative 594 would reduce gun-related violence, and today’s data proves they were misled. Four years later, the Seattle-based gun prohibition lobby promised Initiative 1639 would prevent gun-related homicides, and they lied again. In Olympia, anti-gun politicians are pushing more gun restrictions right now, with the same promises.

The billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobby and their allies in Olympia claim that so-called ‘gun violence’ is an epidemic. Frankly, the intellectual dishonesty of the gun control crowd is the real public health crisis.

Alan Gottlieb
CCRKBA Chairman
January 31, 2022
CCRKBA: KING COUNTY, WA GUN MURDERS, SHOOTINGS PROVE ANTI-GUNNERS LIED
[Hmmm… I’m not sure this is true. Can evil people be a “public health crisis”? It’s at least a little bit twisted in the mixing of metaphors, so to speak.

At the higher levels the anti-gun people know restrictions on access to firearms won’t make the general public safer. You can go back for at least 25 years and listen carefully to the speeches by President Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Diana Feinstein, and the media releases by Handgun Control Inc, The Brady Campaign, etc., etc. Typically they word things very carefully such that they usually don’t actually lie with statements about increased restrictions on firearm ownership and use being a net win for public safety. They knew then and they know now that the real reason for the increased restrictions has nothing to do with public safety. They will imply public safety is the reason but they almost never say it.

There have even been cases where they come right out and say they know it. In his book Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy page 107. Dennis A. Henigan wrote:

I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime. For instance, simple cross-national comparisons of gun availability and crime do not control for the degree to which various countries impose legal restrictions on firearms. It also is difficult to sort out whether high levels of gun ownership lead to high crime rates or whether high crime rates lead to high levels of gun ownership.

Henigan was a HCI and/or Brady Campaign lawyer for years. And he was even acting president for a while. He admits gun ownership rates appear to be uncorrelated with crime rates.

Most of these people are not ignorant or stupid. They are evil.—Joe]

the issue is [in] no other constitutional right do we condition on permitting different jurisdictions to pass different regulations…

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
November 3, 2021
What Will the U.S. Supreme Court Decide?
[With Justice Sotomayor pointing out the error of their ways it is no wonder New York is taking defensive action.—Joe]

Politicians and anti-gun activists will keep up their familiar refrains, which have long been staples of the left-wing establishment. But street-level attitudes are changing in favor of the natural right of self-defense. That may prove to be the ultimate legacy of two very violent years.

Cody J. Wisniewski
January 20, 2022
The Tide Is Turning On Gun Control
[There is evidence to support this. The polls don’t look good for Democrats:

Republicans currently hold a never-before-seen double-digit lead on a generic ballot according to the latest CNBC poll – meaning voters who would prefer any Republican to any Democrat.

In fact, the numbers are equal parts historic and devastating as the 2022 midterms approach.

“In the past 20 years, CNBC and NBC surveys have never registered a double-digit Republican advantage on congressional preference, with the largest lead ever being 4 points for the GOP,” CNBC reports.

The defund the police movement and the pandemic, which correlates with the huge increase in violent crime, was a big motivator in the massive gun sale numbers, ammo shortages, etc. All those new gun owners have to be looking back and forth between their ballot and their gun. Who is saying they will defund the police and take their guns? It doesn’t take much brain power to make the decision to vote for anyone except that evil SOB.—Joe]

The Brady Campaign has asked us to believe the impossible… yet again.

Every January, the gun control group issues a state report card, giving each state a grade on the basis of their gun laws.

But one look at their report card reveals that the grades have nothing to do with how safe people are in the state.

Their report card is somewhat reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. When Alice doesn’t believe the White Queen is 101 years old, she is encouraged by the Queen to spend more time trying to believe the impossible.

“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day,” the Queen smiled. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Well, the Brady Bunch would have us believe many impossible things. But here are six for starters.

First, the group gives Vermont a grade of D- because, supposedly, the “state’s weak laws make it too easy for criminals, the mentally ill and juveniles to get guns.”

But this statement is laughable, for crime in Vermont is virtually non- existent. Just last year (2003), Vermont earned the Safest State in the nation award from the Morgan Quitno Press — a group of statisticians who rank each state according to its safety record.

The Green Mountain State has consistently had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation, as they have earned this “Safest State” award three times in the last ten years.

Erich Pratt
Director of Communications for Gun Owners of America
January 16, 2004
THE BRADY BUNCH VISITS WONDERLAND ONCE AGAIN
[Via Women Against Gun Control, Ladies of High Caliber.

It’s not about reducing crime. It’s about disarming and controlling people.—Joe]

For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity. This is being done as part of a poisonous rhetorical two-step. First, Democrats across the country have instituted radical policy changes, mainly in an effort to address socioeconomic and racial disparities. These included eliminating standardized testing to the University of California system, doing away with gifted programs (and rejecting the concept of gifted children in general), replacing courses like calculus with data science or statistics to make advancement easier, and pushing a series of near-parodical ideas with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that include things like denouncing emphasis on “getting the right answer” or “independent practice over teamwork” as white supremacy.

Matt Taibbi
December 28, 2021
The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump
[Via email from John S.

Taibbi has a point. Politicians can falsely claim to be a climate, crime, or economics expert and the average voter isn’t going to offer stiff resistance to that claim. But if a politician claims high school graduation shouldn’t depend upon proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic you are going to get their attention. It’s something everyone capable of reading is going to have a fair amount of expertise in. And the ruination of our education system has reached the point where it’s impossible to ignore.

The remarkable thing is that when called out on this the politicians don’t admit they were wrong. They double down. From the same Taibbbi article:

When criticism ensued, pundits first denied as myth all rumors of radical change, then denounced complaining parents as belligerent racists unfit to decide what should be taught to their children, all while reaffirming the justice of leaving such matters to the education “experts” who’d spent the last decade-plus doing things like legislating grades out of existence. This “parents should leave ruining education to us” approach cost McAuliffe Virginia, because it dovetailed with what parents had long been seeing and hearing on the ground.

Similar examples could be presented from Democrat attitudes regarding defunding the police, gun control, and failure to secure the border.

This hubris will be their undoing. But will it occur soon enough?—Joe]