Yesterday, I wrote about Fred Thompson’s bizarre and dangerous defense of people who funnel guns into the black market and to criminal organizations in New York City. Thompson wrote an article blasting New York City for trying to track down people who illegally sell guns under false pretenses.
The title of the article was “A New York State of Mind”, and in that article Fred Thompson implied that states with lax gun laws, like his home state of Tennessee, have lower rates of violent crime than states with vigorous gun laws, like New York State. However, the facts show that Fred Thompson is wrong – dead wrong.
Compare the murder rate in Tennessee with the murder rate in New York State, and you’ll see that the Tennessee state of mind is much more violent than the New York state of mind. New York State’s murder rate in 2005, the last year currently reported by the FBI, was 4.5 per one hundred thousand residents. In Tennessee, however, the murder rate was 7.2 per hundred thousand residents.
That wasn’t just a one year anomaly. Look back over the last decade, and you’ll see that the murder rate in Tennessee is well above the murder rate in New York State every year.
In 2008, we need to elect a President who cares enough to look at the facts about gun laws and violent crime instead of just making presumptions based on regional bias. Clearly, Fred Thompson is not capable of being that President.
(Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, published September 2006; ImWithFred.com, August 21, 2007)
