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Local Reporter Goes Rogue, Tells Truth About Guns, Enrages Liberals on Air

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During a report this week, a local Minnesota reporter blew some uninformed liberal minds by touting some basic facts about gun ownership in his state.

“We took a very hard look at these numbers, and we did find that Minnesota has a very high rate of gun ownership — one of the highest in the country — but it has a relatively low rate of violent crime,” revealed Minneapolis station WCCO reporter Pat Kessler in a segment Thursday.

He added that in 2017, Minnesota “set a new record for firearms background checks,” processing 473,975 checks on permits, 94,383 checks on handguns and 125,516 checks on long guns.

In other words, more people attempted to purchase weapons in the state last year than ever before.

“Minnesota set another 2017 record, too,” his report continued. “The State Department of Public Safety reports 283,188 Minnesotans now have permits to legally carry firearms in public.”

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Listen to the full report below:



Interestingly, these numbers coincide perfectly with the research of economist, commentator and gun rights advocate John R. Lott, whose award-winning 1998 book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” centers around the thesis that a well-armed population deters crime.

“Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself,” he explained in an interview that year with the University of Chicago Press.

Do you believe that "more guns" means "less crime?"

“There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate — as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.”

Other research bears this out. Five years ago Forbes columnist Larry Bell pointed to a then-recent Pew Research Study that found that “(n)ational rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes” had dropped significantly since the mid-1990s.

But as noted by Bell, “Those gun crime rates certainly aren’t diminishing for lack of supply…at least not for law-abiding legal buyers.”

“Last December, the FBI recorded a record number of 2.78 million background checks for purchases that month, surpassing a 2.01 million mark set the month before by about 39 percent. That December 2012 figure, in turn, was up 49 percent from a previous record on that month the year before,” he wrote.

And according to data from the FBI, the number of background checks conducted annually have only grown since then, jumping from a total of 19.6 million in 2012 to a high of 25.2 million in 2017.

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More people are seeking out and obtaining guns, and yet America’s top metropolitans are continuing to see record “drops in crime and murder.”

Why is that? I’m not going to speculate because I’m not a trained researcher, but I will quote John R. Lott, who has said many times over, “More guns, less crime.”

Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think about the statistics out of Minnesota.

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