“Even as gun ownership has surged in the U.S. in the past year, violent crime, including murder and robbery, has dropped steeply, says the Christian Science Monitor. With homicides down 10 percent in the first half of 2009, the FBI reports that gun sales ‘especially of assault-style rifles and handguns, two main targets of gun-control groups’ are up at least 12 percent nationally since the election of President Obama. Pro-gun groups say the data disprove a long-running theory by gun-control groups that gun ownership spawns crime and violence. ‘Anti-gunners have lost another one of their baseless arguments,’ says Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation.” (12/24/09)