And now for something a little different……supernatural?

I went down to my grandparents today to help my grandpa out with his computer. The fact that my grandpa is 84 and owns a computer amuses many people, including me, but excluding my grandmother. As usual, my grandfather starts telling stories about the past, most of these are the same stories and lectures I have been hearing since I was a youngling. Some are boring, especially the political lectures and the stories that accompany them. Though I have to admit, I have learned a lot from them. Every once in a while though he pulls out a story that he has never told before, and today was one of those days.

My grandpa was a corporal in the 19TH infantry regiment, 24TH Division, C company, during the Korean war. He said that one day they had taken a hill from the North Korean Army, and that their was a N.K. soldier who couldn’t have been any older than 16, that was still in his fox hole. The soldier was scared out of his mind, and in the fear was holding on to his rifle and would not let it go. Two U.S. soldiers were trying to pull it from him, but this kid would not let go. Finally a sergeant walked up and ran the kid through with his bayonet. My grandpa said that this sergeant was not well liked after this incident, and most of the soldiers shunned him, My grandpa said that he was always nice to the sergeant after that, but never went out of his way to be the sergeants friend. A few weeks later the 24th Division was retreating across a river, and the sergeant was killed. My grandpa said that this was around the 20th of September.

My grandpa then said about a month later, in October, he was on a forward patrol with a few other men, including his lieutenant. He said that he became very sick, and should not have even been out there, but he never reported his illness to anyone. Not that it would have mattered at that time anyway. He said that on this night they had laid their sleeping bags out on the ground, and that most of the patrol was sleeping. He felt someone stepping  on/kicking his should. As my grandpa woke up he saw someone standing over him in the dark, but could not focus his eyes as it was dark, and he was still waking up. My grandpa asked “what do you want? What’s going on?”

He said the figure never said a word, and just pointed to the North.

At this point the just waking up fog lifted from his eyes, and he saw that it was the before mentioned (and dead) sergeant. He said the sergeant then turned around, took a couple steps, and then was gone. 

His Lt called out to him “Heath, who are you talking to?” at which point my grandfather said, “Nothing, I was just dreaming.” My grandpa said that he lay their after that, trying to explain what he saw, and coming to the conclusion that it must be his fever. While he was coming to this conclusion, he said a bunch of bugles started blowing to the North. He said his Lt jumped up, gathered everyone up, and some how they got back to the American lines without getting caught.

The bugles were the Chinese. They had invaded the Korean Peninsula, and were massing for an attack. 

My grandpa says that to this day he can’t explain what he saw. He is a very practical man, very logical, not prone to a wild imagination, does not believe in an afterlife or the supernatural, and does not make up stories. He has told himself over the years that it was a hallucination brought on by his fever. However, in recent years he has thought of the figure pointing towards the North, not even 20 minutes before the Chinese attacked. It bothers him. He asked me what I thought about it, and I had only one thing to tell him.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Moments of Beauty

Ever have those moments that stick with you? Ones of incredible beauty?  The ones that take your breath away because they are so beautiful. I have been lucky enough to have a handful in my short life, and I would like to share a few of them with you.

The earliest one I can remember is a sunset. I don’t know how old I was, I just know I was very young and it was in the summer time. Desert sunsets and sunrises can be things of beauty, and this particular sunset has always topped them all for me. Their were clouds in the sky, but it wasn’t totally overcast, and as I said it was summer, so it was hot. That sun was mostly down, and it turned the whole sky a shade of red I can’t even describe. The clouds became a deeper red, almost scarlet. I have never witnessed one like that again.

The next one I can remember, was somewhere in the Mid West, but I do not remember where. I went on a road trip with my dad the week after high school graduation to Michigan, and then to Washington D.C. My dad has a tendency to drive as much as possible, and only sleep in the car at rest stations. At one point in the evening I fell asleep, when I woke up I looked out the car window I saw a big field that went on for a long time until it became trees. Firefly’s where dancing all across this field, while lighting was flickering in the background. I will never forget it.

The next moment came not too many years ago, at a bonfire on the beach in San Diego. I remember looking at the stars over the water, the fire, and some of my closest friends around the fire, and just feeling that it was a thing of beauty.

The wedding of djmatticus and his lovely wife.

The first time I realized I was in love, not falling in love, not what I thought was love, but actually in Love.

Which leads me in to this; the first time I saw love in my beautiful Jennifer. I saw it in her face one day, the depth of her feelings….and it and she, was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Lonely Road

I wanted to expand a little on yesterdays post. Here is a picture of the road to Austin, Nevada from Tonopah, Nevada. This road goes through the Big Smokey Valley, and is very long, very straight, and very lonely road. Not much out there but a few ranches and a mine or two. It is a really neat drive though.

The town of Austin itself is tiny, old, and interesting. One little part still has the old wooden porch that fronts all the business, which is basically a restaurant and an attached bar, and maybe something else. Neat little town, wish I had been able to explore it a little more, wish I had taken some pictures. 

Writing Challenge: Map it out

I’m a few days behind on reading everyone’s blogs, and attempting to write a blog that someone may read. So I just saw this neat little writing challenge, which is something I have been meaning to do. I have just never been sure of the format, so as usual, I am going to wing it. If you haven’t guessed already, I just sit down and start writing, I never have a plan.  I could go in to more detail about this trip, but this will be long enough as is.

As I previously said in a post, I love my car. Not long after I got my car, I went through a really tough time. Health issues, friend of mine killing himself, and getting in a lot of trouble at work for losing my temper. This was all in about a 3.5 month period. So, in the spring, I decided to take a road trip in my new car. I wanted to travel some of the back roads of Nevada, and I especially wanted to travel on the Extraterrestrial Highway and see the dinky little town of Rachel, and basically drive around the whole Nevada Testing Range, Area 51, etc. My brother decided to go with me.

Here is a map of the whole trip, all 1,100 miles of it.

I will break it down for you so it is a little bit easier to see just where we went.

We left Ridgecrest (where I have lived for the last 15.5 years) and drive North to Bishop,  where we had a late breakfast at the world famous (literally) Erick Schats Bakery. This trip was high desert, going in to mountains, and is quite pretty.

Afterwards we left Bishop,  we headed up up Route 6 through the  Chalfant Valley, and eventually the town of Benton. Not much in Benton except an overpriced cafe/gas station and a trailer park type community. From Benton we headed East and over Montgomery Pass , down in to the Nevada desert, and then on to Tonopah. I may blog more about Tonopah one day.

After getting gas and a snack in Tonopah, my plan was to head on to Rachel and hang out for the rest of the day and night. I wanted to stay in the trailer park hotel, drink, and look for UFO’s. My brother asked if we could take a detour to Austin; “It’s not that far out of the way, and I’ll pay for gas” was his argument. He also said that I could really open up my car on the road to Austin, and if I got a ticket he would pay for it. Hard to argue with that. So we headed North up the Big Smokey Valley towards Austin. Now, this is a long and lonely drive. I think I saw two other cars, which on these Nevada back roads is not uncommon. It is a pretty drive, and I don’t think I did less than 95 mph the entire way there 🙂

Austin was actually a neat little place, I wish we had explored it a little more. I will probably head back one day to do so. After looking at the airport in Austin (my brother is a pilot and is looking at remote airports for a business venture), we headed back down to Tonopah. While there we grabbed another bite to eat, gassed up, took a wrong turn, and headed to Goldfield before we figured out we went 30 miles the wrong way. We were paying very little attention, just enjoying being brothers on the open road. We could have ended up in Florida if we had been paying a little less attention!

Goldfield is a spooky place, you can feel the weight of the dreams that went there to die. I have been there before, and I never wanted to go back. We turned right around, went back to Tonopah, and then went up and around the Tonopah Test Range, and on to the E.T. Highway and then Rachel.

The E.T. highway should be named the Cattle Highway. It is all open range, and absolutely LOUSY with cattle! So here I am, at night, on an unfamiliar road, driving about 25 mph, and dodging cattle. What should have been a little over an hour drive, ended up being closer to three hours.  Good times 🙂 We finally reached Rachel about 9:30 PM, and quickly decided we were not going to stay in this place. Though we did stop for a drink and talk to some very odd locals.

My brother said if I was willing to make the drive, he would put me up in his favorite hotel in Henderson, which is on the other side of Las Vegas. My brother has a business based out of Henderson, but never goes in to Vegas proper, not his style. So, we (I) made the drive to Henderson. I think we checked in to the hotel room some time between 1:00 am and 1:30 am.

The next morning, after some great sleeping in and a late breakfast, we drove down to Boulder City to see the Hoover Dam. What gave this part of the trip some extra spice was a convention in Boulder City. The Mongols Motorcycle Club was having it’s convention there, and the police looked nicely out manned. If you want to read up on the Mongols, go ahead, you will get an idea of why the cops were crapping themselves.

From the Hoover Dam, we decided to drive on to Beatty, stopping only in Indian Springs (home of Creech Air Force Base and a squadron of Reapers) to grab lunch.

From there we went on to Beatty. The only things to do in Beatty are eat, drink, gamble, and sleep; which we did. There are also a couple of brothels…..but I don’t think I will ever be desperate enough to go to a Beatty brothel.

The next morning we had breakfast, and headed over to Rhyolite. Rhyolite is an amazing ghost town, and if you have never been there, you should. I encourage you to read more about it, and visit it. The header picture on my blog page was taken there.

From Rhyolite we went up the Daylight Pass Road, which goes up over the Amargosa Range, and in to Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley. I think the road goes over the foot of a sub range of the Amargosa’s, named the Funeral Mountains. I’m not sure, I just wanted to put Funeral Mountains in my blog 🙂

Long story short on Death Valley; a bunch of 49’ers took a never before taken route to California, went through an unmapped, unknown, and inhospitable desert, and some of them died. The only thing that kept them going was some big black mountains in the distance, which they thought were the Sierras. Unfortunately it turned out to be the Panament Range, which borders Panament Valley…another desert. They eventually made it just North of Ridgecrest, to what is now the Indian Wells. Many had died off at that point though. Fortunately for my brother and I, this is not 1849, and instead of being on foot (the 49’ers had ditched the covered wagons, at the oxen, and even resorted to drinking ox blood while traversing Death Valley), we were in a Dodge Challenger.  So from Stovepipe Wells we went on in to Panament Valley, through the town of Trona (another place where dreams died hard), and back home to Ridgecrest.

Over 1,100 miles of driving lonely back roads, mining towns, cattle towns, Vegas, and bikers. Near Area 51, nuclear test sites, and Reaper Drone squadrons. I was home, and ready for a nap. My car was ready for an oil change, and my brother was ready for a shower.

Edited Post Script: Seems the maps didn’t turn out too well 😦 I’ll have to play around with this later and see what happened.

This morning

Sitting down with a belly full of home made eggs and home fries, drinking freshly ground coffee, watching Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, and my girlfriend stopped by on her way to work to give me a kiss. 

I ask you, can a morning be any better?

Daily Prompt: Call Me Ishmael

The Dark Tower:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

That is my favorite opening line in any book, and it is from one of my favorite books/series of books; The Dark Tower series. Why is it my favorite line? Simple, it captures you and makes you want to read more. Who is this Man in Black? Who is this Gunslinger? Why is the Gunslinger chasing the Man in Black? All questions that ran through my head when I first cracked open the book. The series itself is quite amazing, though it does feel a bit rushed at the end. I use lines from it all the time: “Hile Gunslinger”, “Long days and pleasant nights to you”, “Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame,” even my blog page quote “Go then, there are other worlds than these.” 

Stephen King was hit by a minivan in 1999 (I remember it happened while I was on a road trip with my dad, right after high school graduation). When he recovered from it, he saw that he almost died without finishing his series, so he spent the next few years finishing it, among writing other stores. The problem with it is, as I said before, the last three books feel a bit rushed. The last book has some heartbreaking moments too, The Song of Fire and Ice kind of sting to it really, which is also one of my favorite series. 

I have read many great book series in my young 31 years: Lee Childs Jack Reacher books, Stephen Hunters books about the Swagger Family, Glen Cook’s Black Company series, Tom Clancy’s stuff, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books (though all of his books are set in the same literary universe and most tie in to the Bosch books some how), The Dresden Files, The Dragon Lance books, and of course Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, and others I am forgetting and too lazy to go look through my kindle to find the names too. However, the dark tower series is the one I keep coming back to. 

Even thinking about a Dark Tower inspired tattoo 😛

Long days and pleasant nights to you, constant reader.

Gun Facts

I had a request to reblog this post from back in 2013. Keep in mind, I wrote this three years ago.

Before we get in to this topic I request that any comments made be civil and rational. I cited my sources the best I could. It has been a long while since I wrote anything like this.

When the news popped up about Sandyhook I was just as shocked and saddened as everyone else. While I have no children of my own I have been around a lot of kids, I worked at a kindergarten through 5^th grade daycare for five years, I have a wonderful girlfriend with two beautiful daughters,  (2 and almost 4), friends with children, nieces, and a nephew.  All I could think of was those kids, the hell the families and first responders were going through, and then the potential political and cultural ramifications started hitting me.

Sure enough, I was right. Almost immediately gun control and gun abolitionists came out of the wood work. Rightly so really, we should have discourse and debate about issues in the United States, especially big and tragic issues. What made me irritated is the lack of information; many of these people were making uninformed comments and accusations. Many have never been around or shot a firearm, but were still talking about the functionality of them. For instance as I was bouncing between CNN, FOX, and MSNBC I repeatedly heard news casters on all stations talk about how you could unload of clip of ammo in seconds using a semi auto assault rifle, or that a semi auto assault rifle could fire five rounds a second. This is simply not true, and I will tell you why.

First, there is a difference between semiautomatic and fully automatic firearms. In plain English a semi-automatic weapon is one that fires a round (bullet) with each pull of the trigger, versus an automatic weapon which continues to shoot until the trigger is released or the ammunition supply is exhausted.

Again, a fully automatic weapon (a machine gun) is one that fires a succession of bullets so long as the trigger is depressed or until the ammunition supply is exhausted. Any weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot automatically, more than one shot at a time by a single trigger pull, is legally considered to be a machine gun, at least by the ATF machine gun definition.

A machine gun can normally fire between 400 and 1,000 rounds per minute, or between 7 and 17 rounds per second.

Machine guns have been illegal to purchase since 1934 (The National Firearms Act) for civilians to own machine guns without special permission from the U.S. Treasury Department. Machine guns are subject to a $200 tax every time their ownership changes from one federally registered owner to another, and each new weapon is subject to a manufacturing tax when it is made, and it must be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in its National Firearms Registry.

To become a registered owner, a complete FBI background investigation is conducted, checking for any criminal history or tendencies toward violence, and an application must be submitted to the ATF including two sets of fingerprints, a recent photo, a sworn affidavit that transfer of the NFA firearm is of “reasonable necessity,” and that sale to and possession of the weapon by the applicant “would be consistent with public safety.” The application form also requires the signature of a chief law enforcement officer with jurisdiction in the applicant’s residence.

Since the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of May 19, 1986, ownership of newly manufactured machine guns has been prohibited to civilians. Machine guns which were manufactured prior to the Act’s passage are regulated under the National Firearms Act, but those manufactured after the ban cannot ordinarily be sold to or owned by civilians. Many states have placed further restrictions on these weapons.

As I stated earlier, a semiautomatic firearm is one that fires a round (bullet) with each pull of the trigger. How fast can you pull a trigger on a gun? Trained competition shooters can fire a gun amazingly fast, and they spend hours a day for years honing this ability. The average person does not have the time or inclination to do this. It is these types of firearms that have been labeled “Assault Weapons.”

The ” Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994,” Public Law 103-322 defined assault weapons, and though it is expired, is the definition that is still used.  The law gave a list of specific weapons that it designated as assault weapons and stated the following:

A semiautomatic rifle is an “assault weapon” if it can accept a detachable magazine and has two or more of the following:

• A folding or telescoping stock
• A pistol grip
• A bayonet mount
• A flash suppressor, or threads to attach one
• A grenade launcher.

A semiautomatic shotgun is an “assault weapon” if it has two or more of the following:

• A folding or telescoping stock
• A pistol grip
• A magazine capacity of over 5 rounds
• A detachable magazine.

A semiautomatic pistol is an “assault weapon” if it can accept a detachable magazine and has two or more of the following:

• A magazine outside of the grip
• A threaded barrel to accept a flash suppressor, silencer, etc.
• A barrel shroud
• A weight of 50 oz or more, unloaded
• “A semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm.”

I work on a Navy installation, and I spoke with the local armorer. He stated that while it is not codified, the military uses this definition for an assault weapon: A hand-held, selective fire weapon, which means it’s capable of firing in either an automatic or a semiautomatic mode depending on the position of a selector switch. Again, these kinds of weapons are heavily regulated by the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Now that the definitions of Automatic, Semiautomatic, and Assault Weapon have been established, let us take a look at crimes with these weapons.

The Brady Campaign website states “In the five-year period (1990-1994) before enactment of the ban, assault weapons named in the Act constituted 4.82% of the crime gun traces ATF conducted nationwide. In the post-ban period after 1995, these assault weapons made up only 1.61% of the guns ATF has traced to crime – a drop of 66% from the pre-ban rate.”

They further state “In the absence of a ban on assault weapons, police across America report that semi-automatic assault weapons become the “weapon of choice” for drug traffickers, gangs and paramilitary extremist groups. It happened in the 1980s, before the federal assault weapons ban, and it appears to be happening again now that the law is gone.”

However, multiple sources refute this evidence. David B. Kopel’s paper : Rational Basis Analysis of “Assault Weapon” Prohibition gives the following citations:

• California. In 1990, “assault weapons” comprised thirty-six of the 963 firearms involved
• in homicide or aggravated assault and analyzed by police crime laboratories, according to a report prepared by the California Department of Justice, and based on data from police firearms laboratories throughout the state. The report concluded that “assault weapons play a very small role in assault and homicide firearm cases.” Of the 1,979 guns seized from California narcotics dealers in 1990, fifty-eight were “assault weapons.”
• Chicago. From 1985 through 1989, only one homicide was perpetrated with a military caliber rifle. Of the 17,144 guns seized by the Chicago police in 1989, 175 were “military style weapons.”
• Florida. Florida Department of Law Enforcement Uniform Crime Reports for 1989 indicate that rifles of all types accounted for 2.6% of the weapons used in Florida homicides. The Florida Assault Weapons Commission found that “assault weapons” were used in 17 of 7,500 gun crimes for the years 1986-1989.
• Los Angeles. Of the more than 4,000 guns seized by police during one year, only about 3% were “assault weapons.”
• Maryland. In 1989-90, there was only one death involving a “semiautomatic assault rifle” in all twenty-four counties of the State of Maryland.
• Massachusetts. Of 161 fatal shootings in Massachusetts in 1988, three involved “semiautomatic assault rifles.” From 1985 to 1991, the guns were involved in 0.7% of all shootings.
• Miami. The Miami police seized 18,702 firearms from January 1, 1989 to December 31, 1993. Of these, 3.13% were “assault weapons.”
• New Jersey. According to the Deputy Chief Joseph Constance of the Trenton New Jersey Police Department, in 1989, there was not a single murder involving any rifle, much less a “semiautomatic assault rifle,” in the State of New Jersey. No person in New Jersey was killed with an “assault weapon” in 1988. Nevertheless, in 1990 the New Jersey legislature enacted an “assault weapon” ban that included low-power .22 rifles, and even BB guns. Based on the legislature’s broad definition of “assault weapons,” in 1991, such guns were used in five of 410 murders in New Jersey; in forty-seven of 22,728 armed robberies; and in twenty-three of 23,720 aggravated assaults committed in New Jersey.
• New York City. Of 12,138 crime guns seized by New York City police in 1988, eighty were “assault-type” firearms.
• New York State. Semiautomatic “assault rifles” were used in twenty of the 2,394 murders in New York State in 1992.
• San Diego. Of the 3,000 firearms seized by the San Diego police in 1988-90, nine were “assault weapons” under the California definition.
• San Francisco. Only 2.2% of the firearms confiscated in 1988 were military-style semiautomatics.
• Virginia. Of the 1,171 weapons analyzed in state forensics laboratories in 1992, 3.3% were “assault weapons.”
• National statistics. Less than four percent of all homicides in the United States involve any type of rifle. No more than .8% of homicides are perpetrated with rifles using military calibers. (And not all rifles using such calibers are usually considered “assault weapons.”) Overall, the number of persons killed with rifles of any type in 1990 was lower than the number in any year in the 1980s.

Additionally the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Guns Used in Crime, July 1995, p. 5, states that “From 1982 to 1993, of the 687 officers who were killed by firearms other than their own guns, more were killed by .38 caliber revolvers than by any other firearm.”

A Washington Post editorial (September 15, 1994) stated, “No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.”

How effective was the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban overall?  The USCDC  “found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.”Additionally a study of the ban was mandated by Congress. It concluded, “the banned guns were never used in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders” before the ban, and the ban’s 10-round limit on new magazines was not a factor in multiple-victim or multiple-wound crimes. A follow-up study found “gunshot injury incidents involving pistols, many of which use magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, were less likely to produce a death than those involving revolvers, which typically hold five or six rounds” and “the average number of wounds for pistol victims was actually lower than that for revolver victims.”

Now what about recent statistics? Again, the Brady Campaign website states:  “The Brady Center report, Assault Weapons: Mass Produced Mayhem, documents the concerns of police chiefs from around the country on the increasing problem of assault weapons since 2004 (Brady Center, p. 3). For example, during the last year of ban (2004), Miami police reported that 4 percent of homicides were committed with assault weapons. In 2007, 20 percent were committed with assault weapons (Miami Herald, 2007).”

However, the National Institute of Justice, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics both show that the firearm of choice for murderers is handguns, not assault weapons as defined by the law. Furthermore, the Attorney General of the California DOJ submitted a report in 2010 showing (among many interesting facts) that full auto firearms accounted for .6% of all gun crime, and rifles of all sorts (excluding the previously mentioned fully auto firearms) were only 6.9%. In strict homicide numbers, there are no records of fully auto firearms being used, and rifles account for only 8% of homicides with firearms.

In general all violent crime has been on the decline in the United States.  According to the FBI, murder in the United States has been on the decline for at least five years, including the number of people killed by guns. The FBI statistics show there were 1,642 fewer people murdered with a gun last year than in 2006, a 16 percent drop.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports Website:

• In 2011, an estimated 1,203,564 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 3.8 percent from the 2010 estimate.
• When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2011 estimated violent crime total was 15.4 percent below the 2007 level and 15.5 percent below the 2002 level.
• There were an estimated 386.3 violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2011.
• Aggravated assaults accounted for the highest number of violent crimes reported to law enforcement at 62.4 percent. Robbery comprised 29.4 percent of violent crimes, forcible rape accounted for 6.9 percent, and murder accounted for 1.2 percent of estimated violent crimes in 2011.
• Information collected regarding type of weapon showed that firearms were used in 67.7 percent of the nation’s murders, 41.3 percent of robberies, and 21.2 percent of aggravated assaults.

By looking at this data one is tempted to say that if we banned firearms, or restricted them greatly, then 67.7% of murders would go down. However if you look at states with restrictive gun laws you see that they actually have higher murder rates than those states that do not. While it is not a state, I will use Washington DC as an example. Washington DC enacted a total gun ban in 1976, in the 25 year period following the gun ban the murder rate in DC increased 51% while the rest of the US decreased by 36%. The murder rates for Washington, D.C. and the nation were 26.8 and 8.8 respectively in 1976. Their respective murder rates 25 years later were 40.6 and 5.6. These murder rates are based on the population per 100,000 people. From the Gun owners of America Website, citing the FBI, “Crime in the United States,” Uniform Crime Reports (1977 and 2002). 

Another example of this is Chicago. Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the United States, and they have over 500 homicides this year.

Furthermore, John R. Lott, Jr found in his studies “More Guns, Less Violent Crime,” The Wall Street Journal (28 August 1996). “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns,” University of Chicago (15 August 1996), and  “More Guns, Less Crime” (1998, 2000), states that have enacted concealed carry laws reduced their murder rate by 8.5%, rapes by 5%, aggravated assaults by 7% and robbery by 3% (Also as cited on the Gun owners of America Website).

Finally, all one has to do is look at the news and see that firearm sales have been increasing dramatically over the last few years.  According to the Washington Times gun ownership is way up, crime is decreasing, and 41 States either allow carrying a concealed weapon  without a permit or have “shall issue” laws that make it easy a noncriminal to get a permit. This is compared to 25 years ago when violent crime was at its peak, and only a handful of states allowed concealed carry weapons.