Earlier this week Indianapolis Democrats approved proposals 156 and 149 with majority support. The gun control ordinance put forward by Mayor Joe Hogsett passed out of the Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee will ban “assault rifles” and remove conceal carry. It will act as a trigger law and go into effect only if that state law is changed or struck down by the courts.
The issue is the constitutionality of it. Council minority leader Brian Mowery had this to say:
I’m voting against this because I disagree with the toothless language and the policy itself, but also because it plainly violates state statute and state constitution
This was made in an effort to cut down on the “gun violence,” but how accurate is that, really? I mean as much as they report gun deaths in Indianapolis, they fail to include defensive firearm uses as a distinct separate category. There were nearly 1,000 instances of self defense with a fire arm reported by the media so far this year in which gun owners have stopped mass shootings and other violence and thats just a fraction of how many actually happen.
This ruling essentially stops law abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves from criminals already in illegal possession.
This ruling predicates its validity on how “gun violence” affects children, with the city’s Democrat leadership repeating the false claim that firearms kill more children annually than anything else. It’s not true and unsupported by their own statistics. The CDC famously defined a “child” as young adults over the age of 18 and under 20 years of age — the age of many gangbangers. From Fox59:
Research from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) shows victims and suspects of homicides and shootings are primarily black men between the ages of 18-34. This is despite Black citizens comprising only 29 percent of the overall population in Indianapolis.
The Indiana Department of Corrections even stated in a recent report that that the younger offenders are, the more likely they are to become repeat offenders, returning to the Indiana Department of Corrections. So to top off the lack of acknowledgement towards defensive gun use, we now also see that repeat offenders from the age of 18 to 19 are being classified as children. And this doesn’t make anyone think that maybe the statistics we’re reading are incredibly skewed? I think it does, and you should too.
The claim that “gun violence kills children the most” isn’t even true by their own sources as the leading cause of death is suffocation. For those under 20, firearm deaths exceed vehicle deaths for 2020 and 2021 when you use the CDC firearm homicide data. When you use the FBI data, the vehicle deaths exceed the firearm deaths for 2019 and 2020, and likely 2021 (most recent FBI data goes to 2021).
The facts even change when it comes to suicide. While gun bans are associated with drops in firearm suicides, there is no change in total suicides, as there are many more aofradable and more efficient ways of killing oneself. Banning guns does not remove the wish to die by one’s own hands. All of this data is being misconstrued for a reason.
L. Grey is a researcher and Chapter and Verse contributor.
As I understand it, this is unconstitutional within IN state laws. I've heard that the AG of IN said they can't do this as they have pre-emption laws.
Thank you for writing this L Grey. I am a proud resident of Indianapolis, I was born and raised here. This gun control ordinance put forward by Hoghead (that is what I call him) is a political stunt. He is running for re-election, and he is trying to make it look like he is doing something about the rising crime in the city. The key statement in your piece is ''that it will only go into effect if the state law is changed, or struck down by the courts''. In my opinion, that is very unlikely, and he knows it, but he trying to appeased his base. He is the worst thing that has ever happened to Indianapolis.