In the wake of the horrific school shooting in Florida last week, many political opportunists are demanding for stricter gun laws. They say doing away with AR-15s and promoting the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban would make America a safer place.
Unfortunately the numbers prove them wrong. Recent statistics from 2016 show that knives actually kill nearly five times as many people as rifles that year.
The Daily Caller Reports:
According to the FBI, 1,604 people were killed by “knives and cutting instruments” and 374 were killed by “rifles” in 2016.
Handguns were not included in the assault weapons ban.
Writing on the issue of handgun violence, The Federalist makes this interesting point:
“But what about handgun murders?” you might ask. “They’re responsible for the majority of gun murders, so why don’t we just ban them and stop worrying about rifles?”
Easy: because gun bans and strict gun control don’t really prevent gun violence. Take, for example, Illinois and California. In 2013, there were 5,782 murders by handgun in the U.S. According to FBI data, 20 percent of those — 1,157 of the 5,782 handgun murders — happened in Illinois and California, which have two of the toughest state gun control regimes in the entire country. And even though California and Illinois contain about 16 percent of the nation’s population, those two states are responsible for over 20 percent of the nation’s handgun murders.
Yes, that’s right. Stricter gun control laws do not seem to reduce crime, as California and Illinois have proven. It is unfortunate that the solution is not as simple as gun-control advocates would have you think, but the numbers don’t like. Knives kill far more people than guns, and gun control laws just do not work as promised.
