NICK GILLESPIE: This Is the Time To Defend the Second Amendment and Less-Strict Gun Control: Anti-gun activists are pushing for a crackdown in the wake of the Vegas shooting. That’s understandable but wrong. They demand a sacrifice of liberty to their god the State.

It’s laughable. As a friend on Facebook was noting, 6 months ago, the Left was all “This is the worst fascist government since the 1930s.” Today they’re all “You must surrender your weapons to the beneficent hand of the State.” It’s as if they’re incoherent, stupid, and power-hungry or something.

Writes Gillespie:

It’s not cold-blooded or Vulcan to point out that we remain in the midst of an unprecedented deceleration of violent crime and gun crime. Surely that has some connection to policies over the past quarter-century or so that have made it easier for a wide variety of people to legally own and carry guns.

“From 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” says the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its most recent comprehensive report (published last October, using data through 2015). Over the same period, rates for crimes using guns dropped from 7.3 per 1,000 people to 1.1 per 1,000 people. The homicide rate is down from 7.4 to 4.9. These are not simply good things, they are great things. They are the essential backdrop of all discussions about gun crime and mass shootings, even as we grieve the people killed nonsensically in Vegas.

Yeah, the Party Of Science doesn’t care, because they’re really the Party Of State Power.