From today's Christian Science Monitor:

After several years of crime rates holding relatively steady, the FBI is reporting that violent crimes – including gun crimes – dropped dramatically in the first six months of 2009, with murder down 10 percent across the US as a whole.

Concurrently, the FBI reports that gun sales – especially of assault-style rifles and handguns, two main targets of gun-control groups – are up at least 12 percent nationally since the election of President Obama.

“We can absolutely draw a fact-based conclusion about [whether there’s a correlation between declining crime rates and increasing gun ownership], and the answer is no,” says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control in New York. “There are very consistent findings that the acquisition and obtaining of carry permits by ordinary law-abiding people has either no or very little impact on the crime rate.”

“When you’re seeing declines [in violent crime] both in cities like Atlanta, which is in a relatively gun-friendly state, and in places like New York City, where it is essentially impossible for ordinary folks to acquire and carry especially handguns, then it’s not the guns that are driving the [statistics],” Mr. Kennedy says.



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