Fact Sheet: Guns Save Lives. Here are some well-substantiated points about guns that are consistently omitted by the politically-correct media (US context and figures):

• Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict. Guns are used to defend against criminals up to 2.5 million times every year (though only fired in 8% of these cases), which is 80 times more than they are used to take lives. Up to 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year; only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person versus 11% for the police.
• Concealed carry laws help reduce crime. Violent crime falls in a  state after it legalizes carrying of concealed firearms.
• Criminals avoid armed citizens. Criminals are less likely to enter homes if they think the occupants might be armed, and mass-shootings nearly all seem to occur in “gun-free” zones.

The entire topic of guns is fraught with politically-correct overtones and misinformation, and virtually any pro-gun statement is fiercely contested by the usual suspects. I must admit I swallowed the simplistic PC line for many years. I only became alerted to the issue with the realization that big government wants a compliant and therefore disarmed population — see the different outlooks on the role of government.

Here in Australia we never had a government so unpopular it was worth fighting (well, except a brief episode at the Eureka Stockade). But the US had the War of Independence, essentially a war between civilian colonists and their British government. So while allowance of a “well armed militia” was written into the US Constitution, in Australia there is nothing similar in either our legal system or our culture.

The situation in the US, in particular, seems to generate lots of contradictory statistics — either guns are incredibly dangerous because they enable homicides that wouldn’t otherwise occur, or an armed population is a polite population.

Finally the situation became clearer when I read Guns and Race by Steve Sailer. The rate at which blacks commit murder is about seven times higher than whites, and young black males commit about 27 times more murders than their fair share of the population.

Obviously, gun control isn’t going to do the trick. Many homicides are a byproduct of the illegal drug trade. And blacks are responsible for 65.6 percent of drug-related homicides according to the [Bureau of Justice Statistics].

And, as you may have noticed, the drug business seems to thrive despite stringent drug control. Federal agents are constantly smashing down doors and seizing drugs. Unlike guns, which last for decades, most of the narcotics in the country get consumed every few weeks or so. And yet, a new supply of illegal drugs always seems to show up.

(If you wanted to stop drug trade murders in the US, you’d let Costco sell 100 grams of Johnson & Johnson brand cocaine for $99.99. Of course, applying the Magic of the Market to lowering the legal price of cocaine would cause other problems, such as thousands of coeds suffering brain aneurysms every Spring Break.)

So gun violence seems to be acceptably low among the white sub-population in the US, but unfortunately high among the black sub-population, exacerbated by illegal drugs.