Common Folk Using Common Sense

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin had a press conference in Atlanta City Hall recently trying to drum up opposition to House Bill 89, currently sitting on Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue’s desk. The entire event reaffirmed why Governor Perdue should sign HB89.

Despite holding the press conference in a Public Gathering location (publicly owned building) and behind metal detectors, the Mayor doesn’t feel safe enough within her own building to dismiss her security. At least three members of the Atlanta Police Department, in plain clothes and armed, guarded the Mayor during the conference. Deep down in her heart, she knows that all the gun laws, public gathering bans, and security in the world will not protect her from violent predators. While she hides behind a phallanx of well armed Police Officers paid for by the taxpayers, she demands that those same taxpayers and all citizens of Georgia be denied the ability to defend themselves and their families.

Earlier this year when GeorgiaCarry.Org held a rally in support of comprehensive reform of Georgia’s gun laws, over 125 Georgians took time off of work and traveled to the Capital to ask for change. Many drove hours to attend. That day was chilly and rainy, traffic was bad, and yet they attended. In contrast, the opponents of HB 89 could only muster 23 members of Atlanta’s political elite, most of whom were being paid by the taxpayers to attend the indoor press conference.

The transcript is here.

The people opposing HB89 are Atlanta’s political elite. The people supporting HB89 are the real citizens of Georgia.

Shirley Franklin tried to impress the media with her keen grasp of international politics: “If you look at gun legislation around the world, and you look at the number of gun crimes, you can see a direct relationship between gun control and a reduction of violent crime. You can look at Canada, you can look at India, I mean you can look all over the world. So this notion that Americans are the only ones who need to be safe doesn’t, doesn’t fly.”

“We have evidence from all over the world that when you don’t have, when you have gun control, the violent crime goes down. The mayor of Ahmadabad, India. The mayor of, ah, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. The mayor of Toronto, the mayor of Montreal. There is plenty of evidence.”

Please tell me she really didn’t just say that screed. And not even one mention of any state actually within the United States.

• A report of “Committee on the Control of Firearms,” written by the British Home Office officials in 1918, was the basis for recent gun registration in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand … 80 years after the report was written for the express purpose of quelling uprisings as were happening in pre-Soviet Russia. Today New Zealand repealed their gun registration law after police acknowledged its worthlessness. And Australia’s laws are widely recognized as just an elaborate system of arithmetic with no tangible aim at reducing any crime.
• The provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have dumped both the administration and the enforcement of all federal gun-control laws right back into Ottawa’s lap. More than 20,000 Canadian gun-owners have publicly refused to register their firearms, and many others are silently ignoring the law. The system is so bad that five Canadian provinces (B.C. joins Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Ontario) are refusing to prosecute firearm owners who fail to register.
• The CDC’s Task Force on Community Preventive Services report, “First Reports Evaluating the Effectiveness of Strategies for Preventing Violence: Firearms Laws”, Oct 3, 2003, and the U.S. Department of Justice, “Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers”, August 2006, state that The U.S. government “found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes” and also concluded in one study that none of the attackers interviewed was “hindered by any law–federal, state or local–that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws.”
• Violent crime appears to be encouraged by gun control. Most gun control laws in the United States have been written since 1968, yet the murder rate rose during the 70s, 80s and early 90s.
• In 1976, Washington, D.C. enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. The city’s murder rate rose 134% through 1996 while the national murder rate has dropped 2%.
• Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws.
• Maryland claims to have the toughest gun control laws in the nation and ranks #1 in robberies and #4 in both violent crime and murder.
• In 2000, 20% of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just six percent of the population – New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. – most of which have/had a virtual prohibition on private handguns.
• Washington, D.C.’s 1977 ban on the ownership of handguns (except those already registered in the District) was not linked to any reduction in gun crime in the nation’s capital.
• New York has one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation – and 20% of the armed robberies.
• 18-20 year olds commit over 23% of all gun murders, yet none of these criminals are allowed by law to purchase a handgun.

So, Mayor Shirley Franklin, either you are grossly misinformed, terribly ignorant, or a bald-faced liar. Which is it, Your Honor?

Atlanta, House Bill 89, Georgia, Sonny Perdue, Shirley Franklin, gun control, crime, firearm

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