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Old 11-14-2007, 11:59 PM   #30
joepole
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>In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.
>Drastically increasing homicide led Washington, D.C., to ban handguns in the 1970s. So useless was this that D.C. soon had (and continues to have) some of the nation’s highest murder rates.

Define "soon." The handgun ban went into effect in 1977. By 1985, the murder rate was lower than it had been in 1977, despite the fact that the city was falling apart by every other metric. In 2005 the rate for DC itself was 28.5/100K, which is about 3% higher than 1977 (which was 27.8/100K) not 134%. Where did you get 134%?

Also, the homicide rate in DC was already in decline by the time the law was passed in 1977. The trend continued until the mid 1980s until it exploded upwards (with no corresponding change in DC gun laws) so you're going to have to come up with something other than the handgun ban to explain it. I'd bet it probably had more to do with the invention of crack than it did with handgun laws.

Sources:

Rothstein catalog on disaster recovery

FBI Uniform Crime Report
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