In NYT fashion, Old Gray Lady designs interactive tool to help readers determine need for self-defense gun
Leave it to those reporters at The New York Times to be ever-thinking about ways to keep their readers informed and involved. The Old Gray Lady published an online, interactive tool to demonstrate to readers how important self-defense is, especially in the home.
The Times published an article headlined “This Is How Close We Live to Gun Violence.” The article showed the in-depth work by the Times’ researchers to map every homicide committed by a murderer criminally misusing a firearm in the United States since 2020. The Times drew a quarter-mile circle around each crime scene to then estimate how many people lived near those horrendous crimes.
The Times calculated that 47 million Americans — 8.7 million more than pre-pandemic — live within a quarter mile of these crime scenes. The report didn’t account for the spike in criminal activity during and post-pandemic, and it didn’t overlay the “Defund the Police” policies by progressive politicians and prosecutors to go soft on crime. It did, however, provide a convenient list of the cities with the staggering percentages of those who live close to a murder scene.
Narrative before facts
An accompanying article clutched the collective pearls in the Times’ newsroom, interviewing emergency room doctors who are left to treat those victims of crime and attempt to save lives because of criminals running amok. It portends that the growing number of law-abiding gun owners is somehow responsible for the criminal misuse of firearms, the unlawful killing of others, and overall lack of humanity displayed by criminals.
The Times even wrote, “A rise in gun ownership made it more likely for violent disputes to become deadly.” However, they failed to demonstrate how lawful gun ownership drives criminal activities — much less murder. The Times attempted to tie the murder rates, which are slowly falling, to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), giving the gun control group Giffords Law Center ink to credit gun control laws for reducing murders. The Times glancingly wrote about policing but mostly in a way that was a burden on communities. The authors didn’t seriously address the detrimental effects of yanking thousands of police off the beat, reducing patrols, releasing criminals without bail, or failing to prosecute criminals to only have them repeat or commit more serious crimes. For the authors, law-abiding gun owners were the problem. The readers just needed to trust their narrative.
More newsroom narrative: Anti-gun groups want safety, but pro-gun groups care only about rights. WRONG!
But the authors never proved their premise. They couldn’t show a definitive link between law-abiding gun owners and criminal activity — much less murders — because there isn’t one. There is no causation, or even correlation, between law-abiding gun owners and shocking crime rates in communities across America.
In fact, Shooting News Weekly highlighted that while the data isn’t perfect, there’s evidence of “a slight negative correlation between murder rates and gun ownership.”
“Say what you will — and the gun banners certainly will — but the data doesn’t show a correlation of gun ownership and murder rates,” wrote Rob Morse, the blog’s author. “We also see a number of countries in the data with very low rates of gun ownership and frighteningly high murder rates. We also see countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates.”
He added that confusion of lawful gun ownership and murder isn’t accidental.
“I’m a retired engineer, not criminologist or a sociologist. I spent an hour putting this data together,” Morse explained. “If I can figure out that civilian gun ownership has an insignificant effect on the murder rates in various countries, then so did the researchers who are paid by anti-gun billionaires. This data is out there for anyone to see. They’ve seen it, and it means they lied to please the people who are paying them.”
That study wasn’t the only one to arrive at the conclusion that the availability of firearms to law-abiding owners isn’t the driver of crime and murder. Gun Facts found similar results when it examined their own data.
There’s a link, just not what they think
There is, though, a causation and correlation that go in the opposite direction. As crime runs unabated, more Americans choose to exercise their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. They refuse to be a willing victim, even when progressive policies force police departments to issue warnings to the public to just be nice to the criminal threatening their life.
Background checks for firearm sales at retail stores skyrocketed in 2020 to over 21.5 million. That was up from 13.2 million in 2019, and the kickoff to the buying frenzy started in April 2020, the same month that pandemic lockdowns were ordered and police were pulling back community contact for concerns for contagion. It was also during that time that jails were emptied. That summer, violent protests erupted across America. Those weren’t confined to one city, one state, or one region. It was a nationwide phenomenon. Despite media pitching it as “mostly peaceful,” it was destructive. Politicians blamed police and slashed budgets. It was all made worse by rogue prosecutors who refuse to hold criminals to account.
The result was that crime skyrocketed. The second-order effect was that law-abiding gun owners bought more guns to protect themselves, and many were first time gun buyers from all backgrounds. That wasn’t limited to the 21.5 million background checks for gun sales in 2020. There were another 18.5 million in 2021, 16.4 million in 2022, and 15.8 million in 2024.
Back to NYT's tool helping to decide gun ownership
The good news is The New York Times provided a helpful interactive tool for law-abiding citizens to decide if now is the time to invest in personal defense. Plugging in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C., shows that there were at least 794 fatal shootings from 2020 to 2023. It’s a good thing President Joe Biden has Secret Service protection. For those who don’t have 24-hour top-notch trained security at their disposal, this could be a practical tool to decide if it’s time to invest in a self-defense firearm. After all, in Washington, District Attorney General Brian Schwalb said, “we as a city and a community need to be much more focused on prevention … if we want to be safer in the long run. We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it.”
For those who might live in locations that see far less violent crime and murders, like Bangs, Texas, where there were no fatal shootings between 2020 and 2023, it could still be helpful. Chances are, though, most residents in Bangs likely live in the home of a law-abiding gun owner.
Becoming a law-abiding gun owner might let the community – and The New York Times – know that those who obey the law and own guns aren’t the problem. It’s the criminals.
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