Rebecca Rosenberg
Fox News
February 11, 2022

From the early 1990s through 2019, there was a national decline in violent crime, but the pendulum swung back in 2020

Massive social upheaval spurred by the coronavirus pandemic is in large part to blame for the national surge in violent crime — not guns, an expert told Fox News Digital.

“We have crime because we have people,” said Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Crime is a very complex subject.” . . . 

. . . Professor Jeffrey Butts, the director of John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center, said that in some respects conservatives and liberals are on the same page with gun control. “The far left and the far right are actually pitching the same story,” he said. “The right is saying this is America, and you should be able to have a gun to protect yourself, and the far left is saying when you crack down on gun possession you create racial disparity in cities where it is a criminal offense to have a gun.”

But, he said, he doesn’t endorse Swearer’s opposition to federal gun control laws that would impose restrictions on the entire country. To combat illegal guns, he said we need a federal approach because many illegal guns come from states with less restrictive gun laws. “Imagine if in 1982 people said we’re never going to convince all these people to use condoms, we just have to live with HIV,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a country that just gives up on major public health issues and gun violence is a major public health issue.”

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