Hizzoner Brags About Reduced Gun Violence in New York
And he has reason to brag. Audio at the link, but this is a snip:
New Yorkers know better. Here in New York City, we've done everything possible to take illegal guns off the streets. That includes helping to pass the toughest law in the nation against illegal possession of a loaded gun. It also includes smart, pro-active policing that makes it much more likely that if you break our city's gun laws, you'll be caught. The result: Last year, we cut murders and shootings to all-time lows – and so far this year, murders are down another 34 percent, and shootings are also down another 25 percent. There's just no question that our strategy is working, and today the City's Health Department is releasing a new report that makes that even clearer.
According to the Health Department's new study, between 2000 and 2011, our city's firearms-related murders declined by more than 30 percent – from 524 in 2000 to 366 in 2011. That's in stark contrast to the national trend, which showed no decline over the same period. What's more, the number of New Yorkers who were injured by a firearm in this 11-year period declined, too – by 21 percent. Our success at keeping guns off our streets has meant that our City's overall firearms fatality rate is less than half the rate in the rest of the country, and it's markedly lower than that of other major cities. And when researchers looked at suicide – the tenth-leading cause of death nationally according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control – our study showed that New York's firearms-related suicide rate is approximately one-ninth the national average, and it ranks the lowest among the nation's 25 most populous cities.
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