Send Mayor Daley to Jamaica…and Without a Gun to Defend Himself

Is there anything more despicable than a politician with personal (taxpayer-financed!) security guards who wants to prevent other people from having the right of self defense? Mayor Daley of Chicago is a good example of this strange species (scientific name: hypocratus sleazious). The priceless John Lott looks at the evidence from Jamaica to show the idiocy of gun control:

With Chicago’s Mayor Daley again claiming that a gun ban is necessary to keep Chicagoans safe, Jamaica and other countries with gun bans might teach Americans a lesson. …every instance we have data for shows that when a ban has been imposed, murder rates rise. …Jamaica wasn’t always the extremely violent country that it is today (see the figure here). Jamaica experienced large increases in murder rates since enacting a handgun bans in 1974. Since the gun ban, Jamaica’s murder rate has soared to become one of the highest in the world, currently at least double that of other Caribbean countries. …Just as Mexico’s President Calderon showed last week, it is always easy for politicians to blame crime on guns. The crime data in Jamaica shows the same thing as the crime data in Chicago and Washington have shown. It is the law-abiding, good citizens, not the criminals, who are disarmed by gun bans.