NBC falsely claims magazine disconnects increase safety

Around 11 people are killed each year because their handguns lacked a magazine disconnect, according to a massive 4,600-word special report by NBC News earlier this month.

The story’s title tells you everything you need to know about the content: “A simple device could help curb accidental gun deaths, but most firearms don’t have it.”

“Since 2000, at least 277 people have been killed in gun accidents in which the shooter believed the weapon was unloaded because the magazine had been dislodged or removed, an NBC News investigation found. That total — based on federal data collected from states, as well as media reports, lawsuits and public records — is likely a significant undercount since many states only recently began reporting their data, and information on the cases may be incomplete. NBC News found 41 cases that weren’t captured in the data,” the story claims.

Most of the story focuses on those allegedly killed by a handgun that was improperly used — pointed at an innocent person and the trigger pulled.

“In Kansas, a college football player lost his leg after a teammate fired a weapon in 2018 that he thought was unloaded. In Michigan, a pregnant woman was accidentally shot and wounded by her husband, an Army soldier. And earlier this year, a customer inside a crowded Florida gun show was shot in the foot when another man unwittingly fired off a live round,” the story states.

While any firearm-related accident is horrific, the story makes a lot of its numbers, but by comparison, dogs kill nearly three times as many people per year, around 400 die annually from accidental electrocutions, and texting while driving kills thousands more people every year.

According to their story, the NBC reporters tried to ask more than a dozen firearm manufacturers about whether they would incorporate a magazine disconnect in their modern handguns. None replied to their questions, other than Larry Keane, general counsel and chief lobbyist of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

“If the magazine gets dislodged or damaged and you can’t function a firearm in a life-or-death situation, using a firearm for self-defense — that’s a significant problem,” he told the NBC reporters.

Keane is correct, of course. Besides, whether or not a firearm has a magazine disconnect, no one would have been harmed had the accidental shooters assumed that every gun was loaded and kept the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

Gun Violence Archive

In their second-to-the-last paragraph, the NBC reporters admit where they got much of their data for the story, from the Gun Violence Archive, or GVA.

According to GVA executive director Mark Bryant, every day, his researchers consult “a mass of about 7,500 sources. They are law enforcement Twitter, law enforcement Facebook, law enforcement police blotters, and then we have media sources. The easiest is to grab media sources. Law enforcement is clinical. The media looks more subjectively at an incident.”

The bottom line: GVA’s data is extremely suspect.

Using the GVA data debunks any serious point the NBC journalists were trying to make, because anytime four or more people are shot and even slightly wounded, the small but influential nonprofit labels it as a mass shooting, and politicians, gun control advocates and the mainstream media treat their reports as if they’re gospel even if their data is wildly inaccurate.

For example, according to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30 because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition.

While the GVA collects and publishes several different types of shooting data — mass murders, number of children and teens killed or injured, officer-involved shootings, defenses gun usages and more — it is their inflated mass shooting numbers that are cited most often by the mainstream media, given its penchant for sensational headlines.

In a 2021 interview with the Second Amendment Foundation, Bryant defended his broader definition and the higher body count it yields.

“It doesn’t parse,” he said three years ago. “It gives an accurate picture of the number of times more than four people were shot, whether in a drive-by or a shooting at a rap concert or a country music concert.”

In the interview, Bryant deflected blame for the media’s overhyping and misuse of his data.

“If the numbers are misleading, the journalist didn’t do their homework, you could make that argument. The media zeroes in on it, not us. At one point we wanted to take mass shootings out of the loop, but the phone started ringing on a daily basis. It’s important to me that we’re not misinterpreted. We’re not anti-gun. Look at our staff, over half are gun owners. I intentionally do not hire from the (Gun Violence Prevention) community. I want researchers — period. We wanted to have an honest set of data, and you can use it how you want,” Bryant said.

Bryant’s database is being used by anti-gun politicians, the gun-control crowd and their supporters in the mainstream media. Keep in mind they cite GVA’s data as proof that our rights need some infringing. If Bryant honestly believes in an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, he’d shutter the GVA.

New design

Fabrique Nationale’s new 21st Century High Powers lack magazine disconnects, which says all most shooters need to know about the old-fashioned safeties.

“One component removed from the reboot is its antediluvian magazine-disconnect safety, meaning that the hammer can be dropped and the gun fired with its magazine removed,” NRA’s senior executive editor Kelly Young wrote in a review of the new High Powers.

Antediluvian means “belonging to the time before the biblical flood, or ridiculously old-fashioned.”

Lee Williams is chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation's Investigative Journalism Project. Republished with permission.

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