Press-Citizen Guest Opinion

Last Sunday the Iowa City Press-Citizen published a version of my "More Guns, Less Sense?" post of October 12th. I had written this in response to an anti-Second Amendment guest opinion that the Press-Citizen had previously published.

Although it was a very condensed version of the below post, it contained a few facts that my original post didn't. These included:

"A 1997 study performed for the Justice Department found that there are as many as 1.5 million defensive uses of firearms every year. Two years earlier, a study by criminology professors at Florida State University, put that number at as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year. By any measure, that's a lot of lives saved from rape, robbery or murder.

"According to a 1996 study at the University of Chicago, states that implemented laws wherein private citizens are permitted to carry firearms reduced their rate of murder by 8.5 percent, rape by 5 percent, aggravated assault by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent. Contrast that with Australia, where in the six years following it's sweeping gun ban, armed robberies rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent and kidnappings by 43 percent. Murders did fall by 3 percent, but manslaughter rose by 16 percent after the ban."

You can read the entire article as it appeared in the newspaper here. Or you can read the original extended blog post here.

Thank you to the Press-Citizen for presenting both sides of the argument.