Kennesaw Revisited

"In 1981, Morton Grove, Illinois became the first town in the U.S. to pass a flat out ban on the possession of handguns within the town limits by anyone except police and active duty military during the performance of their official duties. In response, the town of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a gun law of their own in March of 1982. The Kennesaw law was almost the exact opposite to the Morton Grove ordinance. Rather than banning handgun possession, Kennesaw required every head-of-household to keep at least one firearm and appropriate ammunition in their home – with exemptions for those who had religious or philosophical objections to maintaining or using weapons. In other words, gun ownership was mandatory except for people who didn’t want to own a gun.

While Morton Grove became an instant media darling, Kennesaw became a pariah and a punch line. Pundits and “reporters” made jokes and wild predictions about the blood that would soon run in the streets of the small town a few miles North of Atlanta. The derision can still be heard occasionally from a late-night talk show host or a reflective news anchor, but all of the predictions of the “Wild West” and shootouts over fender-benders, simply didn’t pan out. Of course this lack of disaster was simply ignored by most in the media as were the actual results of this little comparative experiment.

Kennesaw and Morton Grove weren’t really a fair comparison when the experiment started. Kennesaw was pretty rural while Morton Grove was solidly suburban. Kennesaw had a population of only about 5500 while Morton Grove was closer to 23,000. And Kennesaw had a per capita crime rate significantly higher than the national average while Morton Grove enjoyed a relatively low crime rate. The fact is, Kennesaw was at a marked disadvantage from the beginning of this comparison. In the nearly three decades since these laws went into effect, Kennesaw’s disadvantage has grown rather than shrunk. While Morton Grove has remained at a fairly steady population, Kennesaw’s population has boomed to take a slight lead. While Morton Grove’s residents are slightly older than the national average, Kennesaw’s are significantly younger. Both towns are predominantly White, but Kennesaw has more Blacks and Hispanics while Morton Grove’s minority population is predominantly Asian. Statistically, Asian populations have the lowest crime rates of any minority while Blacks and Hispanics have the highest crime rates in the nation.

With all of these disadvantages working against Kennesaw, how did the two communities actually fare?

Morton Grove’s relatively low crime rate went up by over 15% immediately after enactment of the ban (12% more than surrounding areas) and has held pretty steady at just a tad below the national average ever since. There has been no statistical indication of the handgun ban having any positive effect.

Kennesaw is a different story though. In 1982, the year the firearms requirement was enacted, Kennesaw realized a 74% reduction in crime against persons over the previous year. That rate then dropped 45% between 1982 and 1983."

Still waiting for the blood to run in the Kennesaw streets?

Don't count on it. Statistics, trends, bellwethers, projections, all go out the window when reality takes over. People who are incapable of defending themselves will forever be nothing more than prey animals. Chicago, NYC, LA, doesn't matter where, but what does matter are two incontrovertible facts.

More minorities means the potential for more crime. More people "allowed" to own guns means that such criminals look elsewhere for their daily bread.

Know why the above mentioned cities can't, and I mean CAN'T join the rest of the country and permit the exercise of basic human rights? The blood would run for a while, and a lot of it, too. The imbalance would take some time to be remedied, and in the meantime those who should be incarcerated but are left free to pillage at will would take advantage of rights afforded to actual civilized human beings and until they pretty much killed one another off with the rest taken out by the police and armed citizens.

It isn't as if they would move to where one is expected to work an honest living. Too late for that. Too many generations of welfare-fed men and women who aren't anywhere near ready to rejoin society. That's why they stay, elect politicians who are ready with the handouts and who ban guns to keep them safe. More of them arrive to partake of the giveaways and suddenly you wake up one morning and ALL of our major cities are worlds unto themselves.

When will it change? Probably never, at least not without another sort of revolution. In the meantime, we worry that such lowlife scum such as Barack Obama can actually become the President of the United States because the thugs and their apologists fear freedom more than just about anything else.