Fort Worth Mayor Demands Gun Control

Texas Scorecard reports that Forth Worth Mayor Betsy Price is joining other mayors and local officials in Texas in calling for stricter gun control legislation.

Price wrote, “I join Mayor of El Paso – Dee Margo, alongside more than 200 other U.S. Mayors, in calling for the Senate to vote on two pieces of legislation that would strengthen background checks and close serious loopholes for gun sales.”

On Price’s Facebook page, she posted a letter that the United States Conference of Mayors sent to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. This letter urged them to pass two gun control bills in the House which would “greatly strengthen the background check system.”

As much as elected officials want to save people from gun violence, research shows that gun control is not effective in reducing gun violence. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center argues that background checks are not effective in curbing gun violence. Last year, Lott wrote an op-ed for The New York Times arguing that the current “background check system confuses the names of law-abiding individuals with those of criminals, resulting in thousands of ‘false positives’ every year.”

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The gun researcher notes that there were over 370,000 gun purchase denials triggered by the background check system from 2006 to 2010. Federal authorities only prosecuted 460 of them, and of those prosecuted, 209 led to convictions

Lott asked an important question:

Why didn’t more of those denials lead to perjury prosecutions?

He added, “According to my analysis, the reason is simple: A high percentage of cases are dropped because the applicant was wrongly denied clearance to buy a gun.”

Indeed, these uncomfortable facts call into question politicians’ impulsive desires to immediately “do something” after these tragedies.

After all, careful research shows that red flag laws have been around for some time in certain states such as Connecticut. In this state’s case, the law was passed in 1999. However, it proved futile in stopping a madman from committing a massacre at Sandy Hook.

The issue of tackling gun violence is not as simple as passing gun control laws.