Guns Don't Kill People: Follow Up

I went online to The Disaster Center at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm and looked up the D.C. statistics taken from the District of Columbia's 2005 Cities crimes and Rates as reported in the FBI's September 2006 release of the "UCR for Metropolitan Statistical Areas" (MSA). Go to the link if you want to see actual numbers. I calculated the number of violent crimes, divided by the year, times one thousand, getting to the number of violent crimes per 1000 people in a given year. Here is a table so you can visualize this data. In Mr. Gillespie's interview, it was mentioned that D.C. gun laws have not helped to lower the violent crime rate. This would appear to be true, as it has fluctuated minimally in either direction, seemingly at random. You would not necessarily be able to pinpoint the year the gun laws came to be unless someone told you. Remember, the number of crimes is per one thousand people.