NPR tackles subject of guns the workplace, repeats misleading data
NPR story ignores facts regarding the nature of gun violence in the workplace
National Public Radio is reporting on a move that would ensure employers in Florida could not deny their workers' Constitutional right to bear arms self-defense while traveling to and from their workplace.
Although the report quotes advocates on both sides of the issue, NPR repeats statistics that completely fail to take into account that the majority of workplace homicides are directly related to another crime, most often robbery.
Citing the National Institute for Occupational Safety And Health at the Centers for Disease Control, the NPR report states that "there are more than ten homicides in the workplace every day and that "the vast majority of those are committed with guns." What the NPR reporter conveniently does not mention is what else NIOSH has to say about workplace homicides:
- "The circumstances of workplace homicides differ substantially from those portrayed by the media and from homicides in the general population. For the most part, workplace homicides are not the result of disgruntled workers who take out their frustrations on co-workers or supervisors, or of intimate partners and other relatives who killed loved ones in the course of a dispute; rather, they are mostly robbery-related crimes."
--National Institute for Occupational Safety And Health
Instead of noting this statement, the NPR report states that NIOSH "does not have authoritative statistics".
Click on the "Read More..." link below for more.
According to a recent NRA-ILA Fact Sheet, anti-gunners and their corporate allies purposely mislead by implying that all workplace homicides involve disgruntled employees. Indeed, in this report, NPR's listeners are led in this report to believe that these homicides are the result of a lack of a "cooling off" period, an "outer perimeter of security", or distance between a disgruntled employee and his firearm. And the NPR report offers listeners no advice on what they should do when warned by their employer that a violent robber may target them as they walk to their cars, as these State of Indiana employees were recently.
The truth is, studies conducted by both the U.S. Department of Labor and the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that between 75 and 82% of workplace homicides occur in connection with a robbery--seven to eight times the number that involve fellow employees. But of course these facts are not included in this report from the federally-funded, left-leaning NPR.
As the NRA-ILA fact sheet notes, the reality that workplace homicides are overwhelmingly associated with robberies proves false the claims that firearms in the workplace create increased risk. In fact, employer policies that forbid firearms put employees who are at most risk from robbery--such as cab drivers and retail clerks--at greater risk by denying them the ability to defend themselves.
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