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Rage Gauge: 64 People Shot in Chicago

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64 people were shot in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend. Where’s the outrage? “Through June, there had already been 315 homicides in Chicago this year, which is a 49% increase over the first half of last year,” writes Jason Riley in the WSJ, author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed. “The political left’s response to gun violence is typically more gun control, even though the places with the biggest problems tend to sport harsher firearms restrictions, and criminals by definition ignore laws.” The article concludes that there is no link to higher rates of gun ownership to higher rates of gun violence. In other words, guns are not the problem.

Linking higher rates of gun ownership to higher rates of gun violence is quite problematic. According to the Pew Research Center, 51% of rural residents own a firearm, versus only a quarter of city dwellers, but urban areas have much more gun violence. Similarly, only 19% of blacks and 20% of Hispanics report owning guns, versus 41% of whites, yet gun violence among blacks and Hispanics is much more common.

If the overwhelming majority of gun owners in the U.S. act responsibly, is the bigger problem the number of guns or the small minority of irresponsible owners? And if the perpetrators of gun violence are consistently concentrated among certain racial and ethnic groups, isn’t it more likely that culture—say, attitudes toward established authority in general, and officials in the criminal justice system in particular—tells us more about gun violence than the number of firearms in circulation? Alas, the answers to those questions seem to be of little interest to most liberals, even the honest ones.

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E.J. Smith

Editor-in-Chief
E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com.