Guns Aren’t Radically Deadlier Than They Were 50 Years Ago, But Our Sick Culture Is

[Kamaji]

Guns Aren’t Radically Deadlier Than They Were 50 Years Ago, But Our Sick Culture Is

Our culture has incubated a disdain for human life while preaching a gospel of indulging selfish urges, no matter how evil.

BY: ELLE REYNOLDS
MAY 25, 2022

After another school shooting — this one at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving at least 21 victims dead — politicians like President Joe Biden are already capitalizing on the tragedy to push their anti-gun agenda. They’ll tell you that the vague category of “assault weapons” has no place in American citizens’ hands, or seize the moment to vilify “the semiautomatic weapons that terrorize us” (as a New York Times essay put it). But these firearms have been accessible for decades — far before school shootings were such an unfortunately common occurrence.

Various versions of the AR-15 are some of the popular firearms most relentlessly targeted by anti-gun lobbyists, with their semiautomatic capability (i.e., the ability to fire multiple rounds without manual reloading, while still requiring the pull of a trigger) blamed for the deadliness of many recent shootings. But Colt sold an AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle starting in 1964, 58 years ago.

As for semiautomatic handguns, one of the most iconic models dates back to 1911. (The Colt M1911 held fewer rounds than many of today’s handguns, but the 13-round Browning Hi-Power came on the market in 1935, and the 16-round Beretta Model 92 appeared in 1976.) The firearms that civilians have access to today are not significantly deadlier than the ones that were manufactured for civilian use over half a century ago. Furthermore, the number of Americans who possess a gun in their homes has overall been lower in the last 30 years than it was from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Yet we’ve seen a heartbreaking rise over the past several years in incidents where evil, disturbed cowards choose to target schools full of vulnerable children. Before Uvalde, there were Santa Fe High School and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and Red Lake High School in 2005 — and those are just some of the names you probably already know.

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But until the late 1980s, the concept of a mass shooter walking into a school and arbitrarily targeting people was incredibly rare, if not completely unheard of. In 1988, a 19-year-old shooter fatally shot two 8-year-olds and wounded nine other people at Oakland Elementary School in Greenwood, South Carolina. In the same year, a woman fired on an elementary school classroom in Illinois as part of a bizarre crime spree. In 1989, a gunman killed five children at Cleveland Elementary School in California. And in 1994, a 37-year-old walked into Wickliffe Middle School and killed custodian Peter Christopher.

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So if the guns in Americans’ hands and homes haven’t radically changed in the last few years, what has? As The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway noted, we’ve seen “no big advances in firearm lethality compared to what citizens could own decades before we ever had regular mass shootings.”

While humanity has been fallen since Eden, the past 50 years have seen countless indicators of exponential cultural decline, not the least of which have been falling marriage rates and skyrocketing numbers of children who are denied the chance to live with both their mother and father. We’re also seeing a pandemic of mental illness, which the years of mental angst and isolation caused by Covid school closures will certainly only worsen.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/25/guns-arent-radically-deadlier-than-they-were-50-years-ago-but-our-sick-culture-is/