…should we conclude from a higher murder rate among people with armed guards that having armed guards increases your chances of getting murdered? Shall we also conclude from this that we the taxpayers should no longer pay to have Secret Service agents guarding our presidents?

 

Actually, the history of assassinations of American presidents could be cited as evidence that armed guards are correlated with higher murder rates, if we proceed to “reason” the same way the advocates of weaker police presence seem to be reasoning.

 

There have been 43 Presidents of the United States, of whom four — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy — have been murdered. That is a murder rate of 9 percent.If the murder rate in the general population — most of whom do not have armed guards — were 9 percent, that would mean more than 27 million Americans murdered today. We haven’t quite…