This week the Philippine National Police and Secretary Mar Roxas released their crime figures for this 2013 election period as allegedly having only 17 violent crime incidents during this Comelec Gun ban. PROGUN disputes this since in reality on the eve of the 2013 elections, we have tallied a total of 1688 violent crime incidents, of which 1317 people have been killed and 810 have been injured, thus far. These figures surpass the previous record of violent crime incidents during a Philippine election which was previously held by the elections of 2001 under Chairman Alfredo Benipayo. As compared to the same period of 2010, during the last presidential elections, violent crime rate has risen by eight times.

When public officials engage in intellectual dishonesty, and mislead the public, it is bad enough. However, deliberately misleading the public about the state of peace and order in our country, inculcates a false sense of security in the mind of the public that everything is in order and that our security is safe. This can have disastrous and deadly consequences, when as we are seeing now, that this false sense of secuirty mulls the public into complacency about personal security and safety, and over dependence upon the capabilities of the police who are incapable of protecting the public against this crime wave. The number of people killed and injured in the Philippines between January to May 2013 rivals that of Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have one and a half months to go before the Comelec Gun ban ends in June and already we have seen the clear and unmistakable trend: The Gun Ban does not work. Moreover, our overriding thesis about the gun ban which we had studied numerous times years ago, is validated: only the law abiding citizens comply with the gun ban, and criminals do not. The continued commission of violent crimes is clearly not a factor or any law or rule promulgated by the state; rather, crime prevention and/or reduction is the product of proper enforcement of the law by those who are sworn to protect us, in conjunction with an armed civilian population which acts as a force multiplier against criminals. Disarming law abiding citizens, as we see now, clearly exacerbates the problem of violent crime by making the job of the criminals easier.