One of the biggest arguments against gun control is the incredibly high gun violence rate in certain cities. Those cities have the strictest gun control in the nation, but that hasn’t curbed the gun violence in those cities. In fact, just the opposite has happened.

Chicago is a prime example (maybe THE prime example) of this situation: strict gun control put in to place by a rabidly anti–2A mayor and/or city council, and gun violence rates in the scary zone because the violence is so high. In spite of the gun control.

Chicago’s “leaders” (you have to use that term loosely in this case, I think) have tried to shift the blame by saying that Chicago’s gun violence issue is because criminals are simply buying guns in neighboring states and bringing them into Chicago to commit crimes.

The blunt answer to that comes from a soft–spoken former Presidential candidate, Dr. (as in M.D.) Ron Paul. Dr. Paul writes,

Another weakness in the argument that more restrictive gun laws will reduce violence is that many of the cities and states with the highest incidence of violent crime have restrictive gun laws. Gun control supporters try to explain this by blaming individuals who bring guns from states with more permissive gun laws into states with more restrictive gun laws. The guns can, though, at the same time be coming from states with less violent crime into states with more violent crime. But, if guns were the problem, then violent crime would be higher in states with permissive gun laws than in states with more legal restrictions related to firearms.

The gun control debate ignores the root causes of rising violence, which is a symptom of the decline of traditional morality that respected every individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and property. This traditional morality has been replaced with a nihilistic philosophy that denies moral law and natural rights. Instead, it justifies doing whatever one feels is necessary to achieve one’s goals.

Dr. Paul is exactly right. The problem of gun violence is the problem driving all violence: a lack of morality and the lack of valuation of individual human life that traditional morality, as we’ve known it in the U.S., promotes.

Those pushing gun control are, for the most part, the same people pushing to strip our culture of any traditional morality as they seek to remake U.S. culture into something else, but it is exactly those efforts to remove morality that is the ideological vacuum in which physical violence flourishes.

In other words, gun control advocates are to blame for high rates of gun violence in those cities like Chicago, which is where the overwhelming numbers of violent crimes in America are committed.

As Dr. Paul said, if guns were to blame, then, states without gun control or with less gun control would be more violent than where gun control is in place legally.

And that’s just not the case.