Following a recent FBI report that the first half of 2006 saw an increase in violent crime, anti-gun rights organizations quickly moved to blame passage of concealed carry laws and other common sense reversals of 1990s gun control policies.

There’s a term for such a theory: Preposterous. Across the country, experts have anticipated this crime increase for some time, because of the rising number of younger males in what researchers call the “crime prone years,” combined with a decrease in the number of jobs for unskilled workers and, perhaps most importantly, a return to the streets of gangsters who were imprisoned in the 1990s, and who have completed their sentences.

Couple that with a deplorable rate of recidivism and pattern of leniency from judges who ought to know better, and you have the makings of a disaster. Overworked police — whose ranks have been thinned because many belong to military reserve or National Guard units now deployed overseas — are fighting what amounts to a “holding action” against both new and recycled criminals.

This is hardly the environment in which hysteria-driven crusades for restrictive firearms laws that only affect law-abiding citizens should gain much political traction, except perhaps on editorial pages, in liberal Congressional offices and other bastions of gullibility.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which should more accurately call itself the “Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership,” claimed that during the 1990s, crime fell because the Clinton Administration made it “harder for criminals to get guns.” That’s not true and he knows it. If gun restrictions are the solution to violent crime, perhaps Helmke can explain why violent crime is skyrocketing in Great Britain, where private gun ownership is highly regulated. Maybe he can explain why the Australian gun “buy back” has had no measurable effect on homicides there.

Gun laws passed early in the Clinton administration made it more difficult for honest citizens to legally purchase firearms of their choice. Those laws did nothing to keep criminals from getting guns, and a Justice Department survey entitled “Firearm Use by Offenders” (NCJ-189369) proves it.

That study, derived from a survey of prison inmates, revealed that “During the offense that brought them to prison, 15 percent of State inmates and 13 percent of Federal inmates carried a handgun, and about 2 percent, a military-style semiautomatic gun.” Notice that only a handful of these criminals were armed with so-called “assault rifles,” a favorite target of gun control extremists.

The most damning revelation from the report, for what it does to one of the gun control crowd’s favorite targets — the mythical “gun show loophole” — is that less than 1 percent of these criminals (0.7 percent) acquired their guns from gun shows. Another 1 percent got theirs from flea markets. Not surprisingly, 78.8 percent got their firearms from family or acquaintances, on the street or other illicit sources.

Expect perennial gun-haters like Helmke to ramp up the rhetoric against sensible concealed carry laws that are proving their effectiveness in some 40 states. With violent crime on the upswing, and experts predicting it will keep rising, this is no time to advocate victim disarmament laws. May as well put wolves in the sheep pasture and bid them “Bon Appétit!”

American voters, tired of being victims of criminals and scapegoats for gun control fanatics, fought to reverse this country’s head-in-the-sand attitude about crime and how to quell it. In state after state, law-abiding citizens rescued their right of self-defense. They learned through years of political indifference that the best way to fight crime is to fight back, and to secure for themselves, their neighbors and friends the means to win that fight.

What anti-gunners deliberately overlook about the new crime report is that the biggest increases are in larger cities, most of which have restrictive gun laws, while murder rates have dropped in medium and small sized cities. Citizens in those smaller communities are more likely to legally arm themselves, and criminals know it.

Alan Gottlieb is founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) in Bellevue, Wash.