Monday, March 24, 2008

Police and Criminals in an arms race.

As an object lesson today on the liberal anti-gun media read this news story:

Police race to match criminals' firepower, Congress owns blame

I've talked about other disinformation put out by anti-gunners before.

In the article above the author makes such claims as "More and more police departments now arm patrol officers with military-style weaponry that can match criminals' firepower and even penetrate body armor....the lawmen had warned Congress and President Bush about this very problem in 2004 as they tried in vain to be heard over the pro-gun drumbeat of the National Rifle Association."

The author quotes Police Chief Scott Knight as saying "the firearms of choice for terrorists, drug dealers, gang members and thugs will be back on our streets where once again our officers will be outgunned by criminals.'', then adds "That has come to pass."

Well no it hasn't. Even during the so called "assault weapons ban" the bad guys still got the weapons. In particular this article mentions the West Hollywood Bank Robbery of 1997: "Los Angeles police learned the danger of being outgunned by criminals wearing body armor in 1997, when 11 officers were injured, plus two civilians, in a gun battle with two bank robbers." Well the problem that the author neglected to mention was that incident happened DURING the 1994 to 2004 assault weapons ban. Not to mention that the bank robbers were using fully automatic rifles that have been previously "banned" under a 1984 law.

Early in the article though is the real kicker in the liberal anti-gun bias. The author writes: "Last year saw the largest number of police officers killed on duty in five years, with 69 shot to death" alluding that they were killed by assault weapons (that's what the article is about of course), but doesn't mention the statistical breakdown.

With a simple google search (but I'll save you the trouble) we find this document: Law Enforcement Officer Deaths, 2007. On page four we find that Assault Weapons account for exactly 1 of those 69 deaths. Hand guns account for 51 of the police deaths. I'm not for banning hand guns either because we already know that banning them just makes it so law abiding citizens are defenseless.

Again the liberal anti-gun media misrepresent evidence for their own agenda of taking guns away from the populace. No good has ever come from disarming the law abiding people.

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