In one major Democrat-run city after another, crime has spiked steadily over the past 12-24 months, especially shootings.
In Portland, Ore., for instance, murders are up 800 percent year-over-year since 2020, and in other cities like Chicago, some neighborhoods are now being described as “war zones.”
The horrific spikes in crime are direct results of equally horrific Democrat policies — in most of these cities, there are literally no elected Republicans — but the Biden regime, which is being led by the AOC wing of the party, is laser-focused on guns.
Using logic similar to “forks cause obesity” and “cars cause vehicular deaths,” Joe Biden and his handlers’ statements about guns causing crime are laughable to experts, as The Washington Times reports:
Former police officers and criminal justice experts are raising doubts about President Biden’s crime-prevention strategy, saying there is no evidence to support his claims that targeting gun dealers will curtail the nation’s soaring crime rate.
Mr. Biden recently announced a three-pronged plan to combat the rising tide of violent crime. The steps he outlined include targeting licensed gun dealers who break laws, creating strike forces to stop firearms trafficking, and seeking more money for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency that tracks the nation’s guns.
The president said the strategy will save lives by targeting “merchants of death,” but offered no metrics on how much his new policies could reduce gun deaths.
However, there is no high-quality research linking the curtailing of federal firearms license (FFL) dealers with a reduction in violent crime, said law enforcement officials and criminal justice scholars.
“When we look at violent crime, most of the offenders did not go to an FFL dealer, fill out all of their paperwork, legally purchase a gun and then go commit a violent crime,” said Betsy Brantner Smith, a spokeswoman for the National Police Association. “That’s such a silly, childish notion. That is not how most of the violent offenders are obtaining their weapons right now.”
Meanwhile, Derek Cohen, vice president of policy at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said anecdotal evidence indicates that only a few firearms dealers are connected to gun crimes.
“You could have a pawnbroker that doesn’t adhere to the rules, but I’ve looked at this space for the last 20 years and if the primary focus of a business is selling guns, just because of the licensing requirements, dealers are crossing every T and dotting every I,” he said.
Some of the same experts said their organizations have to stop relying on left-wing gun control groups like Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety to provide data because it is often skewed and indicative of confirmation bias.
“We need to show the American people what we are doing, who we are arresting and what is happening to them as they go through the system,” Smith said. “One thing the American public really needs to know is how our system works. Let’s show them and let’s let law enforcement spearhead this.”
Smith added that the country won’t see significant drops in crime until local Democratic officials get serious about enforcing laws.
“A year from now, the data that we are going to see is that going after rogue gun dealers will do nothing because that’s not where this problem comes from,” she said.
