This week, they’re starting on the danger of citizen-owned guns again. These mush-mouthed, hand-ringing buttinskys keep telling America that guns are bad. Guns are making our country a very dangerous land, they say. Guns kill people, they repeat. It’s like the frontier days out there all over again, one babble-breath said. Listening to these fugitives from fact, one would think that the nefarious pistol in the drawer next to me is actually lying in wait for me to open the drawer so it can jump out and shoot me.

A few years back I published a well circulated paper detailing the difference in violent crime between the United States and four European countries where guns are closely regulated. No matter that I used "official" FBI statistics, I was immediately chastised for being politically incorrect.

Regardless, here’s the basic (offending) data from the 1992 FBI Uniform Crime Report. The numbers are related in incidents per 100,000 population:

Country	Murder	Robbery
U.S.A.	9.3	263.0
England	7.4	62.6
France	4.6	90.4
Germany	4.2	47.4
Italy	6.0	68.6

If these numbers are taken on their face value, the United States is truly more dangerous than these four European countries. However, a great deal of the crime in the United States is committed by street gang punks and other riffraff in the inner-city. The FBI did not correct for that. However, we still can get some idea of the source of the problem by using their figures for the race of the perpetrators.

	Murder	Robbery
White	5.1	126
Black	43.1	1,343

All I’ve got to say about these numbers is that, unfortunately, my black friends and neighbors in Detroit intuitively knew them to be true. It was the liberal press, and of course the politicians, who didn’t want to hear this stuff.

The FBI defines justifiable homicide as being "limited to the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty, or the killing by a private citizen of a felon during the commission of a felony." The FBI reports that, in 1995, there were a total of 383 justifiable homicides by police officers and another 286 by civilians. Most, of course, were justifiable shootings by the use of a handgun.

The FBI identified 7,071 (31.5%) white and 8,285 (36.9%) black murders in 1995. Another 6,660 (29.7%) were of unknown race.

As politically incorrect as this information may be, these are the facts as per the FBI, an organization currently under the control of liberals. These data are posted on their web page for anyone to see. Yet, journalists and politicians never bother to look.

The FBI report positively identifies 1,157 murders by juvenile gangs alone -- and that is just the ones they know about. They identify another 1,010 murders as drug related. And so on, and so on.

[Note: There are no FBI data for murders committed by legally armed citizens simply because there were none. And that, even though by 2000, thirty-one States issued a combination of many thousands of permits to carry a concealed weapon.]