Re: NY Times Editorial

Click on the title of this post to see the article.

In response to an editorial in the NY Times yesterday that clearly ignores the relevent facts of the situation, I am going to defend our 2nd Amendment. Liberals beware, below are statistics that factually prove that Florida has it right when it comes to gun ownership laws.

What the author fails to mention in his high school quality position against pro-gunners is that in 2005, Florida recorded a murder rate 13% lower than the rate for the rest of the country and that Florida’s 2005 murder rate was 58% lower than it was in 1986, the last year before the state’s landmark Right-to-Carry law took effect.

Since we are throwing around facts, In 2005, 'Right to Carry' states had, on average, 22% lower total violent crime, 30% less murder, 46% lower robbery, and 12% lower aggravated assault rates, compared to the rest of the country (as Reported by the FBI).

To conclude their article, the author states:

"The gun lobby, predictably enough, is blaming “bleeding-heart, criminal-coddling judges and prosecutors” for this grim state of affairs. The truth is that the National Rifle Association has succeeded too well in herding legislators to do its dangerous bidding. Lawmakers in 38 states have approved bills allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons.

As in some of those states, Florida’s legislators take the position that it’s no fun to have a gun if you can’t use it. So they loosened the laws on self-defense to allow a civilian to stand and use deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary.” If lawmakers had any sense of shame, they would undo these lethal threats to their constituents."

There is a reason that 46 states have laws permitting concealed carrying of firearms, and 38 states, accounting for two-thirds of the U.S. population, have Right to Carry laws; it is because people in positions to vote on legislation look at facts, not propoganda (which is something new to the New York Times, it's falling readership, bleak financial outlook, and its great past of top editorial plagiarism and fake stories). The facts overwhelmingly support that states that support gun ownership laws have less crime.

Sometimes you wonder just how much ranting garbage the Times will allow in its paper.

Final word: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that there are more than 2.5 million incidents annually of individual citizens using their gun to stop a crime.