The gun nuts, especially in Arizona, will argue with you until they are blue in the face that because the state’s gun laws allow just about anyone to own a gun and carry it around concealed to just about anyplace they want, including bars, that the state is a safer place for it. They would be wrong. In a recent Wall Street Journal Letter to the Editor, Richard Reay of Riverdale, NY, made his point by using the 2010 FBI Violent Crime Statistics report.
As an example, there are 408.1 violent crimes and 6.4 murders/manslaughters in Arizona per 100,000 population compared to 392.1 and 4.5 in New York. In the same comparison, Texas is 450.3 and 5.0. Reay’s letter was reacting to the typical inaccuracy of a gun freak who spews out whatever garbage the National Rifle Assn. (NRA) tells him to. The guy, a Californian named Dave Culver, was ranting over the fact that the people of New York were less safe because they had been disarmed by their civic leaders.
To add to Culver’s misinformation, Reay tells us that gun-related robberies and aggravated assault in New York were around 20 percent and 25 percent that of Texas and Arizona, respectively. (also in FBI Crime Statistics) With the population growth of cities like Phoenix, Dallas and Houston, the density rate is adding to the problem, and when you give anyone in those metropolitan areas a handgun that asks for it, you are just asking for trouble.