Letter that I have in today's Washington Times
Though Steve Chapman's column "A pointless handgun ban" (Commentary, Thursday) was otherwise extremely well done, as usual, he is wrong in saying, "The murder rate dropped in Washington, D.C., after it outlawed handguns...."
The ban started on February 5, 1977. The District's murder rate was 26.8 per 100,000 persons in 1976, and it rose to 27.8, 28, 27.4, 31.5 and 35.1 in the following five years. Though the murder rate has gone up and down since then, since 1976 it has only once fallen below what it was before the ban. Indeed, the overall violent crime rate soared from 1,481 to 2,274 per 100,000 persons in the five years after the ban.
JOHN R. LOTT JR.
Resident scholar
American Enterprise Institute
Washington
posted by John Lott at 2:12 PM
2 Comments:
Hopefully, the new legislation that the NRA is pushing through will begin to correct DC's crime problem. It would be a good idea to remove the GFW DC mayor from office as soon as possible. Then we need to host an instructional class in a public access building somewhere in DC for the purpose of re-educating the people there in the principles of self-defense. *Sigh* So much to do, so little time....
The best thing about changing the law is that it would be an experiment whose results couldn't be ingored. There would be all sorts of extreme claims that crime rates would soar and everyone would see the resulsts weren't what they predicted.
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