It only increases violence. And the #s prove it!
Thus the maxim: "If guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns."
"Effectiveness of D.C. gun ban still a mystery" by Paul Duggan/Washington Post November 18, 2007
WASHINGTON - Three decades ago, at the dawn of municipal self-government in the District of Columbia, the city's first elected mayor and council enacted one of the country's toughest gun-control measures, a ban on handgun ownership that opponents have long said violates the Second Amendment.
All these years later, with the constitutionality of the ban now probably headed for a US Supreme Court review, a much-debated practical question remains unsettled: Has a law aimed at reducing the number of handguns in the District made city streets safer?
Although studies through the decades have reached conflicting conclusions, this much is clear: The ban, passed with strong public support in 1976, has not accomplished everything the mayor and council of that era wanted it to.
Over the years, gun violence has continued to plague the city, reaching staggering levels at times.
Opponents of the ban, who won a March ruling in which the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared the law unconstitutional, said in a legal filing that the District's "31-year experiment with gun prohibition" has been a "complete failure." Meanwhile, D.C. officials, who have asked the Supreme Court to reverse the March decision, say the ban is a legally permissible public-safety measure that has saved lives.
Which side is correct depends on whose social science research is accurate. Although the city points to research indicating that street violence would have been worse without the law, opponents of the ban cite studies to the contrary.
"It's a pretty common-sense idea that the more guns there are around, the more gun violence you'll have," D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer said.
Is it? Or are you just repeating received propaganda, fascista?
"One of the difficult things is, you can't measure what didn't happen," Singer said. "You can't measure how many guns didn't come into the District because we have this law."
Like trying to prove a negative, that's how they try and get you to give away our rights!
But you can measure the violence that did occur, using the bellwether offense of homicide to chart the ebb and flow of crime in the District since the ban was enacted. And the violence here over those years was worse than in most other big cities, many of them in states with far less restrictive gun laws.
Because GUN CONTROL DOESN'T WORK! It just HELPS CRIMINALS!
And FASCIST GOVERNMENTS!!!!!!!!
The advent of the crack market and the unprecedented street violence it unleashed nationwide sent homicide rates soaring in the latter half of the 1980s. Not only did the number of killings surge in the District, the homicide rates here also far exceeded the rates in crack-ridden cities where handguns had not been banned.
Please explain this, fascista lefty-liberals. Please explain.
From my cold, dead hands, fascists!
Almost as sharply as violence in the District increased, it declined through the 1990s, a drop researchers attributed to the burning out and aging of a generation of crack dealers and users. Again, the shift reflected national trends."
