Heroin deaths surpass gun homicides for first time, so why would we legalize drugs while we’re banning guns?

I would like to ask a question. According to the gun-grabbers on the American left, it’s a foregone conclusion that if something is associated with a lot of problems, you need to “control” that something, by which they mean to severely restrict it or preferably ban it. Well, sort of. This applies when the thing that’s associated with problems is something the left already doesn’t like, and the left does not like guns.

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So if there are deaths associated with guns, it’s simply obvious and not even necessary to discuss that we need to make it as difficult as possible to legally buy a gun, and preferably impossible. If you disagree, you don’t care about people’s lives and you’re in the back pocket of the NRA. F-bombs will be aimed at you on social media and it will be said there is no point talking to you because you want people to die. But this does not always apply. You probably think based on recent news coverage that gun-related deaths are soaring. This is not true, but what is true is that, in recent years, we now know that deaths from opiate drugs have exceeded deaths from guns for the first time:

Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015. Heroin deaths spiked too, rising by more than 2,000 cases. For the first time since at least the late 1990s, there were more deaths due to heroin than to traditional opioid painkillers, like hydrocodone and oxycodone. “The epidemic of deaths involving opioids continues to worsen,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden in a statement. “Prescription opioid misuse and use of heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl are intertwined and deeply troubling problems.” In the CDC’s opioid death data, deaths may involve more than one individual drug category, so numbers in the chart above aren’t mutually exclusive. Many opioid fatalities involve a combination of drugs, often multiple types of opioids, or opioids in conjunction with other sedative substances like alcohol. In a grim milestone, more people died from heroin-related causes than from gun homicides in 2015. As recently as 2007, gun homicides outnumbered heroin deaths by more than 5 to 1.

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Why does the left think it’s a good idea to start decriminalizing drugs, while they can’t wait to ban guns?

So here’s my question: Why does the left think it’s a good idea to start decriminalizing drugs, while they can’t wait to ban guns, when the drugs are causing more deaths than the guns? I realize it’s mainly marijuana they’re pushing to legalize at the moment, but these libertine movements always proceed step-by-step. What they’re really doing is trying to establish in law the idea that what people put into their bodies is their own business and not the business of the law at all. I realize there are some conservatives who have become enticed by libertarianism and also find this idea appealing, but generally we have understood that the use of so-called “recreational” drugs is a destroyer of lives and of communities and that we need to have legal mechanisms to combat it. Once marijuana is legalized, there will immediately spring up a movement to legalize all other drugs. That has been the goal all along. So what’s the difference? Why do guns need to be banned but drugs need to be legalized, even though the drugs are causing more deaths than the guns? It’s so simple you really can’t miss it. There are very few liberals who like shooting guns, but there are lots of them who like doing drugs. This has always been about allowing them to do what they want while coming down on others whose activities they do not approve of. It really has nothing to do with who’s dying. Hundreds of thousands of people die from drugs every year, but the left doesn’t call for harsher drug laws because the left has no anti-drug inclination to begin with. Fewer people die from guns, but they want guns banned because they are already predisposed not to like guns. It’s as simple as that and it always has been.

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