THERE GOES THE EVIDENCE FOR AN NRA TALKING POINT -- NOT THAT IT'S GOING TO BE DROPPED

The fact that Chicago has a high murder rate is one of the favorite rhetorical trump cards of the gun absolutist crowd, but it turns out that the city's murder rate is dropping:

Three months after Chicago notched the most murders in the nation, officials are touting a dramatic downturn in crime.

In the first quarter of the year, murders dropped 42 percent over the same period last year and shootings were down 27 percent -- reductions that authorities say were fueled by anti-gang initiatives.

...March, in particular, brought good news for the city and its beleaguered police force: murders down 69 percent, with 36 fewer people slain than in March 2012....

It won't matter, because math is hard, especially for right-wingers (and right-wing media outlets) determined to ignore it, so any individual Chicago murder story can still be used to "prove" that Chicago law enforcement (and therefore gun control and liberalism) is an abject failure, especially if the story stays up at the Drudge Report long enough.

And it's uncertain whether Chicago can sustain this progress, as Slate's Justin Peters noted a month ago, when good February numbers came in:

... the Chicago Police Department reported only 14 homicides this February -- half as many as last February, and the city's lowest single-month total since 1957. Police superintendent Garry McCarthy credited the drop to his decision to flood so-called crime "hot zones" with extra officers pulling overtime shifts, combined with pre-existing "area saturation teams" assigned to various high-crime districts....

McCarthy's new murder-stopping strategy incorporates elements of both data analysis and community work.... Saturation policing ... uses data to identify high-crime areas, but deploys cops who are ... theoretically accountable to the districts they're serving.

The trouble is that this strategy forces the CPD to open the overtime faucet, which the cash-strapped city can't afford to do indefinitely. (Chicago faces a $300 million budget deficit.)...

And, in fact, a recent AP story on Chicago is headlined "Chicago Homicide Rate Down, Police Overtime Surging."

I regularly read that, in the gun debate, one thing all sides agree on is the need to reduce the rate of gun violence. I disagree. I don't think the NRA agrees on this. At worst, the NRA could be said to have a vested interest in keeping the crime rate high -- crime creates fear, which sells guns; high-profile killings lead to calls for gun control, which invariably lead to a surge in gun sales. At best, the NRA is indifferent to the crime rate, except to the extent that the crime rate suits the NRA's purposes.

The NRA is not a good citizen -- if it really gave a damn about crime, it would publicly back Chicago crime-reduction initiatives, and advocate continued funding for them, even as it agreed to disagree with the city on gun laws.

But that's not what the NRA does. It's like a bratty child (albeit a bratty child with unlimited power) -- it wants what it wants and that's it, and it throws tantrums until it gets its way.