BELLEVUE, WA – Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett should ignore anything he heard at a recent anti-gun mayors’ summit in New York, and instead trust his own citizens to fight violent crime in the city by enabling them to fight back, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) said today.
Before the end of April this year, the city had posted 26 murders, including 19 involving firearms.
“Contrary to what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel implied in an April 30 editorial,” noted SAF founder Alan M. Gottlieb, “these homicides were not caused by firearms, they are the work of armed criminals in a city where honest, law-abiding citizens cannot legally carry concealed handguns for their personal safety because Wisconsin’s anti-gun governor does not trust the citizens who elected him. And Tom Barrett appears to be cut from the same cloth.
“Last year, Milwaukee posted more than 100 homicides, and yet last month Mayor Barrett was hobnobbing in New York with Michael Bloomberg and other notorious anti-gun mayors, trying to figure out how to keep citizens in Milwaukee even more defenseless than they are now,” Gottlieb marveled. “The criminal element must love this guy because, by his attendance at Bloomberg’s so-called summit, he’s signaling that he wants to continue providing armed thugs with a risk-free working environment.
“This week, tens of thousands of law-abiding members of the National Rifle Association will gather in Milwaukee for their annual convention,” Gottlieb noted. “It is a staggering contradiction that the city will welcome their open wallets with its open arms, while essentially trusting none of them.
“If Mayor Barrett really wants to do something about violent crime,” Gottlieb stated, “he should be out there campaigning day and night to give his constituents the means to fight back. Research has shown that in places with common sense concealed carry statutes, violent crime goes down. Legally armed citizens are a proven deterrent to crime. Unarmed citizens are at the mercy of criminals who don’t know the meaning of the word.”