Welcome to Massachusetts - you're more likely to be indoctrinated by liberal lies here.
Returning students like myself are probably familiar by now with the billboard I'm referring to, located on the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park. The propaganda, put up by Stop Handgun Violence (SHV), a non-profit organization based in the Newton office of the Meredith Management Corporation, reads, "Welcome to Massachusetts. You're more likely to live here. Most effective gun laws and lowest gun fatality rate in the country. Gun laws work." If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth taking a look. That massive billboard could be one of the biggest lies you'll ever see.
The idea that strict gun laws prevent violence would be a compelling argument in favor of gun control - if it was at all true. The fact is, strict gun control laws actually lead to an increase in violent crime because law-abiding citizens no longer have a way to protect themselves, and criminals, who have illegal guns anyway, know it. Let's take a look at the organization that put up this billboard. On its website, www.stophandgunviolence.com, SHV does not disclose any political affiliation, leading one to believe that it's a nonpartisan group. Meanwhile, according to www.opensecrets.org, the president of the Meredith Management Corporation, John E. Rosenthal, donated $6,500 to various Democratic presidential candidates during the 2004 election cycle and has donated $2,000 so far to Democratic candidates for the 2006 elections. Knowing the political agenda of SHV should make you look at the billboard's text more critically.
The "Stories" section of SHV's website presents a bunch of sob stories about children accidentally killed with guns they found in their homes.
While these tragic accidents certainly make a case for more responsible parenting on the part of gun owners, the website conveniently does not mention that most of the guns involved in these incidences are legally owned, so stricter gun ownership laws would do nothing to prevent this type of gun "violence," to use the word SHV uses to refer to accidents. In "The Facts" section of the website, SHV cites statistics from reliable sources from 1994 to 2000; the most recent statistic they have to prove their case, from April of 2000, is more than five years old. That ought to make you suspicious.
Nowhere on its website does SHV provide the actual statistic indicating that Massachusetts has the lowest gun fatality rate in the country. I think it is very believable that Massachusetts has a low gun fatality rate. In the past year, however, the murder rate in Massachusetts has increased while it has significantly decreased for the country as a whole. Before the federal ban on assault weapons ended in September 2004, and for an embarrassingly long period of time afterwards, SHV's billboard had a different slogan: it urged people to prevent the federal ban from expiring.
To make a long story short, the federal assault weapons ban was about the most useless piece of legislation since, well, since whatever bill Congress passed before it, and, contrary to what gun control advocates had imagined, neither law-abiding citizens nor violent criminals flocked to the stores to legally buy assault weapons after the ban ended. While gun control advocates predicted a sharp rise in violent crime in the end of 2004 after the ban was lifted, preliminary 2004 Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI indicate that violent crime nationwide, which had increased steadily from 2000 to 2002, decreased 1.7 percent in 2004 from 2003, while homicide decreased 3.6 percent, and forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault all also showed modest declines. So why did homicide and forcible rape both increase significantly in Massachusetts when it was decreasing in the rest of the country? The number of murders in Boston alone went up by 56.41 percent in 2004 from 2003. Massachusetts is one of seven states that had its own ban on assault weapons when the federal ban expired. According to the FBI report, the 43 states without assault weapons bans had an average decrease in homicides of over 4 percent. The seven states with assault weapons bans only had an average decrease in homicides of 2.4 percent. In three of these states, including Massachusetts, the number of homicides actually increased, according to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Homicides in Massachusetts and in other states with their own ban on assault weapons increased or decreased by very little in the past year while homicides have been significantly decreasing in states without assault weapons bans. Stop Handgun Violence would have us believe that it is Massachusetts' strict gun control laws that are responsible for its low, but rising, rate of gun fatalities. An armed citizenry is the best way to prevent gun violence because the bad guys aren't going to attack someone if they think she's capable of fighting back. Criminals go after defenseless people, not people who are prepared to protect themselves and their families with a gun. The next time gun control advocates start talking about how this state needs stricter gun control laws, you might as well just shoot me.
I am thanking my lucky charms I don't live in MASS!
