Bruce Krafft runs the numbers and busts a few myths. A whole lot of interesting studies and statistics to bust all the myths about more guns equaling more crime, and the US having a higher rate of violent crime than any civilized country.

K&M do a further drill-down on demographic, historical and geographic which is far too detailed for me to go into here but their conclusions are unsurprising (at least to us “gun nuts”): There is absolutely no positive correlation between firearm availability and violent crime, murder and suicide.

In a sense, this is good information to disseminate. As many people as possible being armed with the actual facts is a good thing.

In another sense, though, it doesn’t matter. The people pushing for more ‘gun control’ legislation know perfectly well that those laws won’t actually reduce crime, or save lives. What it’s really all about is unilateral civilian disarmament.

Here’s something else to think about, while you contemplate government action intended to disarm the civilian non-police population irrespective of any impact such disarmament would have on crime. There are now almost 800,000 police in the US, a number that seems to be exceeded only by Russia, India, and China. These police are increasingly armed with military weapons, up to and including armored vehicles.

(Notice that we don’t even talk about police as ‘civilians’ anymore? There’s an unspoken agreement that our police are a paramilitary force, not quite part of either the population at large or the official armed forces.)

As a paramilitary force, our police would be the third largest in the world. As an army, it would be the sixth largest, between North Korea and Israel.

But we are supposed to believe that this massive police force, with its assault rifles and body armor, its drones and its light armored vehicles is hopelessly outgunned because some citizen can carry 11 bullets in his pistol.

Riiiight.