Via Bearing Arms By Tom Knighton
Gun control advocates often claim that various regulations are essential to prevent things like mass shootings and other forms of active shooter incidents.
They claim over and over that as long as we have our current level of access to guns, we're going to keep having problems with shootings.
Luckily for them, California has every law they're currently pushing and then some. If gun control works out well, the Golden State shouldn't have any problem at all.
Except, well, they do. In fact, they have a big one.
New figures from the FBI show that heavily gun-controlled California led the nation in “active shooter incidents” in 2023.
The FBI “designated 48 shootings as active shooter incidents” in 2023. California was the leading state in the nation, having 8 of the 48 incidents, Fox News reported.
ABC News commented on the FBI findings, noting, “California had the largest number of active shooting incidents with eight. The locations of the shootings were open spaces, places of businesses and education centers.”
Fox News likewise noted, “California – which has some of the toughest gun control laws in the country – led the way with eight incidents.”
Now, to understand what we're seeing here, we need to mention a couple of things. One is that California still has the largest population of any state. Some will say that because of that, they're likely to have more active shooters than other states.
That's certainly a fair take. After all, nothing about that is inaccurate.
Yet California had over 16 percent of the total number of active shooters in 2023. They do not have anything close to 16 percent of the American population.
So what does this actually mean? Is it evidence that gun control leads to more crime? Not in and of itself. What we do know is that while California Gov. Gavin Newsom touted his state's gun violence rate as being 57 percent lower than Florida's, their overall violent crime rate is higher. In 2022, they had the sixth-highest violent crime rate in the nation, while Florida was ranked 38th.
While California had more active shooters than elsewhere, they also have more violent crime as a whole than elsewhere. While they might not have as much gun crime, the fact that they make it so hard for people to own and carry guns meant criminals could act with impunity, even if they didn't have a firearm.
In this case, the number of active shooter incidents is just another symptom of the problem with gun control. Anti-gunners routinely argue that such laws benefit society, but they haven't benefitted anyone. California has all the gun control in the world and yet they have plenty of problems with violent crime.
So yeah, it's evidence gun control doesn't work, in part because it's not the only bit of evidence out there that California's anti-Second Amendment efforts aren't really benefitting its citizens, just the people who prey on them.
Not exactly breaking news by any stretch of the imagination, I know, but the truth is what it is, and this most recent information is just another example of how pathetically bad gun control is at preventing violent crime.
Which is why they always seem to cherry-pick which kinds of crime they want to talk about.
Read in its entirety at BearingArms.com.
