Violent crime is too often tolerated by political leaders in our urban areas. Part of the reason for this is that anti-gun politicians, and many of the members of the media who support them, have decided that the individual horrors of these crimes are not worth mentioning until a crime story or statistic becomes particularly useful to them politically. At this point, they will passionately step in front of cameras and blame the Second Amendment, this nation’s law-abiding armed citizens and the NRA for the violence.
These politicians become puffed up with righteous indignation as they recite gun-control talking points. No personal accountability enters their rhetoric—not their support for cashless bail nor for reduced sentences for violent criminals nor their defund-the-police policies. They will not even admit that the gun-control laws they support disempower good citizens and turn them into easy victims for the criminals who ignore the law.
If it occurs to these politicians that there is blood on their hands, it is not voiced in their public proclamations. All that matters to them is what is politically useful—and a disarmed citizenry is an end that justifies their horrific means.
But then along came President Donald Trump (R), a politician who is willing to upend the disgusting lie that lawfully armed citizens are responsible for violent crime, and suddenly these anti-gun zealots have little to say.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to legislatively control the District of Columbia. And, with the Home Rule Act of 1973, Congress gave the president the power to temporarily control the District’s police department during an emergency. So, with violent crime out of control in D.C., President Trump signed an executive order to tackle the problem.
Trump’s initiative gave us an important correction to bad policy, both because of the lives it has saved and is saving in D.C. and because of the lives similar policy changes could save in Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles and more.
D.C. has long treated good, law-abiding citizens as if they were the cause of the crime problem. So much so that when D.C. would not even let an armed security guard, Dick Anthony Heller, carry a gun for self-defense as he went home after guarding a federal building with a gun, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in D.C. v. Heller (2008) and ruled that the right to bear arms is obviously an individual right. Then, two years later, the Supreme Court extended this ruling to the rest of the nation in McDonald v. Chicago.
Nevertheless, even after these rulings, both D.C. and Chicago—and many other big cities—have continued to make it as difficult as possible for citizens to carry guns for self-defense.
The Trump administration, however, is upending this treatment of law-abiding citizens. This is freaking out the anti-gun Left, as their false narratives are crumbling.
This is because the Trump administration is not going after legally owned guns in D.C. They are focusing entirely on criminals who are legally prohibited from owning guns.
During an Oval Office press event, the president explained that “people have to be able to protect themselves” as he empowered Attorney General Pam Bondi and others to go after actual criminals, especially those prohibited from possessing firearms.
This honest approach blew up the false narrative that our freedom is to blame, as the District’s atrociously high crime rates plummeted.
Before the Trump administration stepped in, notes President Trump’s executive order, “the District of Columbia [had] a higher violent crime, murder, and robbery rate than all 50 states.” But after just the first week of the Trump administration’s efforts, the D.C. police union reported that robberies dropped 46%, carjackings plunged 83%, car thefts fell 21%, violent crime declined 22% and murders fell to zero. The example is crystal clear.
Despite this, many anti-gun politicians and media members continued to claim there was no problem to solve in D.C. One wonders if they would have the gall to repeat this false claim in a room filled with the victims of violent criminals.
The facts are hard to talk away, though; as a result, even some entrenched anti-gun ideologues began to admit that focusing on actual criminals works. For example, about three weeks after the federal takeover, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) said, “We know that we have had fewer gun crimes, fewer homicides and we have experienced an extreme reduction in carjackings.”
That is an understatement, but it is a beginning. Hopefully, this mayor, and many others, will now stop blaming law-abiding armed citizens for crime rates and instead will empower the various parts of their justice systems to catch and prosecute actual criminals.
Your NRA, being the force of good it is, has always supported law and order—and we stand opposed to scapegoating the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. Indeed, the more people who join this association, the more sway we have together to push for good policies that save lives and empower good citizens, such as what the Trump administration is accomplishing in D.C.
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