Kennesaw, Georgia, USA deserves to be the capital of the United States. The southern city historically best-known for producing the legendary judge and baseball commissioner “Kennesaw Mountain” Landis, has reached a milestone that has liberal gun control advocates shaking their heads in passive aggressive denial. What has been revealed of Kennesaw is certainly not news that’s “fit to print.” On second thought, perhaps Kennesaw is a rather poor choice for the nation’s capital. Crime in that proud polity is, antithetically to Washington, D.C., so distressingly low.
It is axiomatic to all Americans of the most minimal common sense that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens is the greatest deterrent to street crime. The trend is an absolute. In locales where citizens freely carry guns, crime is lowest. In metropolises with tight gun control, violent crime is rampant. The reasons for this are so self-evident they hardly need explaining. Why would a criminal want to mug someone who has a gun? In fact, why would a street thug want to attack anyone in a city where people are, by law, permitted to carry firearms? The potential prey might have a gun. To a well-thinking criminal, the most bountiful terrain for a life of crime is a city with strong gun control laws, where the predator knows people are unarmed.
This, of course, is all so much basic logic. But not to gun control fanatics, who simultaneously deny the obvious and ignore all relevant statistics on such matters. Moreover, in addition to their troubling ignorance, gun controllers are among the most shameless liars. Still further, gun controllers actually maintain, with a straight face, the notion that gun control is an anti-crime measure. This is on the order of death penalty abolitionists claiming that capital punishment is not only not a deterrent, but actually encourages murder.
Kennesaw, and the news it made less than three decades ago, now presents gun control enthusiasts with an unbearable and embarrassing situation because the city takes the extraordinary step of not only allowing law-abiding persons to possess a gun, but requiring it.
On March 25, 1982, Kennesaw enacted an ordinance requiring law-abiding heads of households to keep at least one firearm in their homes. Subsequent to that law, which is now celebrating its 27th anniversary, the population of Kennesaw rose from somewhat over 5,000 to about 15,000. But the most stunning numbers (to gun controllers, not to sensible people) are the plummeting crime statistics in response to the law. In the very first year of its enactment, violent crimes dropped 74 percent. They fell another 45 percent in the second year. Even with the rising population, the crime numbers have stayed unbelievably low.
The homicide rate is now non-existent. There have been exactly three murders in 27 years — two with knives and one with a gun. Yes, all those legally accessible guns haven’t exactly spurred honest people to mayhem, as gun controllers would claim. (Maybe the two knife murders will have them calling for knife control, since the knife-murder rate is double the gun-murder rate!)
Other crimes of violence have also virtually disappeared from the radar screen in Kennesaw. The average number of armed robberies is 1.69 per year; rapes average two per year. Burglaries into people’s homes are basically suicide missions for criminals. And what is significant is that it appears that the mere presence of firearms or, more importantly, the advance knowledge that Kennesaw citizens are armed, has prevented criminals from even trying.
Now, it would seem in a country with a free press, especially one that is prone to publicize occurrences that it considers staggering, that the news out of Kennesaw would be front-page and network-leading. Don’t bet on it. Major media are so married to the gun control philosophy that their transparent bias will not permit the same kind of attention given to schoolyard killings that invariably result in worried editorials calling for more gun control.
So, with the results coming out of Kennesaw mirroring what has occurred in every other part of the country where guns reside in the hands of honest people, why haven’t national politicians pointed to the facts as an excuse for abolishing America’s 20,000 worthless gun control laws? Interestingly, gun control proved such a losing issue in 2000 and 2004 for liberals that its usual proponents, like Senator Chuck Schumer, were conspicuously silent after the Santee school shooting. In fact, Schumer was not exactly silent — he issued a statement saying he would not use the incident as a reason for introducing more gun control legislation. Progress, progress.
It is said in certain circles that if so-called civil libertarians were as passionate about defending the Second Amendment as they are about the First, college professors would be making speeches insisting the Second Amendment requires mandatory gun ownership. Kennesaw, Georgia is ahead of its time.
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