By james art Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is pushing back against a narrative pushed by some Democrats that the state needs tighter gun control to combat rising crime. The issue resurfaced this year after Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin called for more gun control in response to a mass shooting in his city that killed 4 people.
“We have no interest in this whole debate about Second Amendment rights,” Woodfin said at the time. “We have no interest in people wanting to protect their homes, militia, whatever you want to say. There’s a certain element in this town, there’s a certain element in this community who are all too comfortable riding around with semi-automatic weapons, automatic weapons, conversions, switches and everything else, whose sole intent, diabolical intent, is to harm people, to shoot people, kill people.”
Marshall told WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program” that the statistics simply don’t support the case for more gun laws.
“I don’t accept that at all,” Marshall said. “If that was in fact the cause, then why aren’t we seeing more evidence of the steady increase in serious crime in our state?” We don’t.
Marshall pointed to other cities in the state that have the same gun laws but have not seen an increase in crime.
“Look, Huntsville is a great example of that, isn’t it? I mean, you can see a significant contrast between violent crime in the Tennessee Valley versus what we’ve seen in Montgomery and Birmingham,” he explained. “So if, in fact, if the gun problem is the cause of this crime problem, then the data should reflect that in other places, and that’s just not the case.”
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Marshall argues that there are other ways they have dealt with crime that have been shown to work.
“We’ve seen tremendous success in Montgomery, and we hope that people have been able to watch the collaborative efforts of ALEA, the local sheriff here in Montgomery, our office, as well as the Montgomery Police Department, where there has been an exponential decrease in violent crime rates, robbery rates , sexual assaults as a result of increased law enforcement in communities,” he said. “You know people want to talk about the wines on the spot. The reality is we know what works and that is proactive, professional and committed law enforcement working in communities.”
“And it’s interesting to me that many of those who have been engaged in the narrative of defunding the police, and those who have really demonized the work of law enforcement in general, have now come full circle and said that we need the presence of law enforcement or communities,” he added. “We need to put the bad guys in jail and then we can allow safe practices to take place in communities across Alabama.” We’ve shown it works here in Montgomery.
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Marshall said he hopes Birmingham implements a similar strategy as Montgomery to help the city fight crime.
“We have shared this success with Birmingham officials and hope they will take advantage of the opportunities to be proactive in putting law enforcement where they are needed so they can effectively recruit, grow their police force , because that’s what works,” he asserts. “When you have a law enforcement presence doing their job, we see communities become safer, and it’s an opportunity to be able to do that across the state.”
Yaffee is a contributor to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays from 9 to 11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yafi
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