Save The Children?

The Stiletto ^ | March 16, 2007 | The Stiletto

[theothercheek]

A WaPo op-ed, "Give Us Back Our Gun Law" argues that restricting gun ownership by adults prevents guns from getting into the hands of juveniles, who borrow them from friends and family members or buy them on the black market.

Cathy Lanier acting chief of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and Vincent Schiraldi, of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, cite gun control laws enacted during 1995 and 1997 in states surrounding D.C. that "choked off black-market sales, while the D.C. ban on guns in the home reduced the ability of youths to borrow guns from family and friends."

The pair notes that from 1995 to 2006, "the number of juveniles charged with homicide in the District fell 86 percent … In 1995, 14 of the 227 people charged with a homicide in the District, or 6 percent, were juveniles. Last year, only two out of 106 people (fewer than 2 percent) charged with homicides in the District were juveniles."

Curiously, Lanier and Schiraldi do not disclose what weapons these juveniles used to commit homicide; the reader is supposed to infer that guns - and not knives or baseball bats or even hands or feet - were used to commit these crimes.

Meanwhile during this period, adults living in D.C. were the victims of these violent crimes (statistics from The Disaster Center, as reported in the FBI's September 2006 release of the "UCR for Metropolitan Statistical Areas"):

Year	Population	Murder	Forcible Rape	Robbery	Aggravated Assault
1995	554,000	360	292	6,864	7,228
1996	543,000	397	260	6,444	6,310
1997	529,000	301	218	4,501	5,688
1998	523,000	260	190	3,606	4,932
1999	519,000	241	248	3,344	4,615
2000	572,059	239	251	3,554	4,582
2001	573,822	231	181	3,780	5,003
2002	569,157	264	262	3,834	4,962
2003	557,620	249	274	3,941	4,597
2004	554,239	198	222	3,202	3,968
2005	550,521	195	166	3,700	3,971

The Stiletto thinks that Lanier’s and Schiraldi’s concern over a handful of juveniles - who were no doubt already well on their way to a life of crime – is misplaced, when compared to the nearly 3,000 adults who were murdered from 1995 to 2005.

And what about the juveniles who were directly harmed by Washington, D.C.’s gun control laws? The ones whose unarmed parent didn’t stand a fighting chance against his or her murderer.

NOTE: I used an HTML editor to make the chart come out right, so I know the links are OK in this. But if you feel like going to the original source, underneath this item is one on fake news and Dan Rather.