Honesty in the Press

It seems the Hartford Courant is admitting that gun control hasn’t done anything to fight crime in New England.

In 2004, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gave Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island a B or better for their efforts to inhibit gun violence (Connecticut and Massachusetts got an A-), while Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all received a D-.

Statistics from 2005, however, tell a much different story. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the murder rates in Portland, Maine, and Manchester, N.H., were 4.7 and 3.6 respectively per 100,000 residents – low when compared to the murder rates in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, Springfield and Providence, which were more than twice their northern neighbors’ and higher than the national average of 6.9 per 100,000 during the same time period.

Yep.  But it gets better:

What do these statistics tell us? Restrictive and needless legislation does nothing to prevent violence. Erecting unnecessary roadblocks (i.e. gun control) to legal gun ownership only hurts, and at times dissuades, the law-abiding citizen. More importantly such laws do nothing to impede the criminal, because criminals do not adhere to the law. This is why lawmakers would better serve and protect those of us in Connecticut if they sought to address and remedy the destructive culture in our cities and elsewhere. Destroy this mindset as opposed to devising harmful legislation that does nothing to solve the true ills that plague certain communities, which are the real reasons why violence is occurring in the first place.

I wish the Philadelphia press could be this honest.   Read the whole thing.