 Share
|
« Previous Daily-dish | Next Daily-dish » |
Email
Print
|
Uber-Armed
ByJack Shafer fisks the recent slate of articles on guns:
This year's uptick in buyers must reflect some new gun owners, but if past surveys are a good guide, surely most of these buyers are repeat buyers. This means that the well-armed are probably getting better-armeda point none of the recent news stories makes.
Further tamping down the fears of the nation's anti-gun nuts are data compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. NORC found that gun ownership in the United States has been falling since 1977 (PDF, Page 11), when 54 percent of households reported owning a gun, compared with 34.5 percent in 2006. More good news for anti-gun nuts: According to the Department of Justice, nonfatal firearm-related violent crimes are down sharply since 1993, and nonfatal firearm-related violent victimization rates are also down since 1994. (Both rates turned up slightly in 2005 but remained low.) Crimes committed with firearms peaked in 1993 and stabilized at late-1980s levels.
