With the horrific shooting that recently took place in Las Vegas, debates over gun control have been given center stage in our media and politics once again. And while every pundit seems to have their own surefire way of combatting gun violence, they all gloss over the elephant in the room. Which is, although mass shootings have taken on a repulsive aspect of popularity recently, the gun violence surrounding the War on Drugs has created more casualties than every mass shooting in the U.S. combined.

In September, the FBI released new homicide data, and the overall US homicide rate rose for the second year to an eight-year high. 

According to the report, the nationwide homicide rate in the US in 2016 was 5.3 per 100,000, up from 2015’s rate of 4.9. 

The homicide rate in 2014 — 4.4 per 100,000 — had been a 51-year low, and comparable to rates not seen since the 1950s. 

“Mark Thornton returns to the Scott Horton show to discuss his latest articles for the Mises Institute “The Real Cause of America’s Opioid Epidemic” and “Big Pharma Makes Drugs that Please Regulators, Not Customers.” Thornton makes the case for why legalizing heroin—and all drugs—would be a major step towards solving the opioid crisis.

Growth in the supply of US dollars fell again in September, this time to a 116-month low of 3.4 percent. The last time the money supply grew at a smaller rate was during January 2008 — also at a rate of 3.4 percent. 

November 7, 2017, marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian (or Bolshevik) Revolution in Russia that happened on that date in November 1917, which lead to the communist “dictatorship of the proletariat” and ushered in an epoch of totalitarian tyranny and mass murder both in Russia and in every other country where socialism was put into practice.