Making the Grade

Each year the anti-second-amendment folks at the Brady Campaign issue “grades” to each state in the union. This year, thirty-two states received a “D” or an “F” grade measuring their state’s gun laws. The Brady Campaign assigns this grade based on a state’s “Anti-Gun Violence Laws.”

Actually, that is a misnomer; they really should be called “anti-legitimate gun ownership laws.

California gets an A- grade while nearby Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Idaho all receive “failing” grades. The truth is that these other states know what California’s legislators seem not to know; anti-gun laws do not decrease a state’s crime rate. I suggest inverting the grades to get the real value from the Brady Campaign’s assessment; states like California and Massachusetts which get an A are really getting an F when it comes to protecting their citizens from crime.

From NRA News:

When is it good to get a failing grade? When the Brady Campaign is the one issuing the report card.

The anti-gun group comes out every year with its list of “gun grades” for every state, and lots of newspapers rush to publish their results. Their goal is to lead you to believe that there is some type of relationship between their “gun grades” and gun crime.

But there’s not.

Howard Nemerov, a freelance writer, recently published a piece that tears apart the Brady belief that more guns equals more crime. Nemerov found that states that have passed shall-issue Right-to-Carry laws have a violent crime rate 27.5 percent lower than states that don’t have shall-issue Right to Carry. And even though the crime rate went up nationwide last year, it climbed less than one percent in shall-issue Right to Carry states, but it went up more than five percent in the states without shall-issue Right to Carry.

What does this mean, besides the fact that the Brady Campaign’s “gun grades” are useless?

It’s simple. Law-abiding gun owners aren’t the problem. Criminals are. And the laws the Brady Campaign tries to pass don’t do anything to stop criminals- just law abiding gun owners.

The Brady grades don’t indicate anything other than a willingness to disarm law-abiding citizens and leave them at the mercy of the bad guys.

Maybe an “A” grade means “Anti-gun,” and an “F” stands for “Freedom.”

In that case, I’d be glad to live in a state with a Brady failing grade.

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