The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic’

Posted on | March 25, 2018 | 2 Comments

“Today we are going to start a revolution. We will change America with or without these politicians.”
— David Hogg, March 24, Good Morning America

Promising a “revolution” to “change America” by disarming citizens is rather a radical ambition, but ABC News and other liberal media organizations promote this propaganda without offering any critical analysis or providing access to facts that contradict Hogg’s claims.

The liberal media did not produce news coverage of Saturday’s protests. Instead, they produced one-sided publicity for gun-control activists. The media have uncritically amplified the claim that events like last month’s Parkland massacre represent an “epidemic” of “gun violence.”

Facts contradicting this rhetoric are not difficult to find, and any journalist who ignores these facts has failed his professional duty.

America’s schools are not experiencing an “epidemic” of shootings. In fact, as Northwestern University researchers James Alan Fox and Emma Fridel recently reported, school violence is declining:

Since 1996, there have been 16 multiple victim shootings in schools, or incidents involving 4 or more victims and at least 2 deaths by firearms, excluding the assailant.
Of these, 8 are mass shootings, or incidents involving 4 or more deaths, excluding the assailant. . . .
Mass school shootings are incredibly rare events. . . . [O]n average, mass murders occur between 20 and 30 times per year [in the United States], and about one of those incidents on average takes place at a school.
Fridel and Fox used data collected by USA Today, the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, Congressional Research Service, Gun Violence Archive, Stanford Geospatial Center and Stanford Libraries, Mother Jones, Everytown for Gun Safety, and a NYPD report on active shooters.
Their research also finds that shooting incidents involving students have been declining since the 1990s.
Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

If school shootings are a rare phenomenon that is actually declining — that is to say, the opposite of an “epidemic” — why did the February shooting at Parkland High School inspire more than a month of saturation media coverage advocating gun control? The answer can be summarized in two words: Partisan politics.

Donald Trump is president, Democrats are angry, we are a few months away from a midterm election, and the Democrat-controlled liberal media organized a propaganda campaign to demonize Republicans, by blaming them as responsible for the deaths of students in Parkland. A coalition of Democrat-aligned organizations, including Planned Parenthood, spent millions of dollars to fund Saturday’s protest rallies.

Like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests of 2011 and the “Black Lives Matter” movement of 2014-2016, the post-Parkland gun-control crusade is a “battlespace preparation” campaign by Democrats and their liberal media allies, who seek to establish a narrative that makes Republicans the scapegoats for a social problem. With “Occupy Wall Street,” the problem was economic inequality; with “Black Lives Matter,” the problem was racism and police brutality; with David Hogg and the Parkland crusaders, the problem is gun owners and the NRA. But like other political crusaders, the anti-NRA protest mobs are advancing a false narrative about an alleged “crisis” that does not actually exist. Ryan McMaken emphasizes the need to reject this phony “crisis” narrative:

In the wake of last month’s Florida shooting, many opponents of gun control made the mistake of simply accepting the claim that school shootings are getting worse, and are more deadly overall.
According to Fox’s research, though, this is simply not the case. . . .
Maybe American society is in a more perilous position that in the 1980s. But if we’re looking for evidence of that, the homicide data won’t help the argument.

If there is not actually an “epidemic” of school shootings, there is no need for new gun laws to prevent such shootings. And, as Ann Coulter has suggested, maybe guns aren’t the real problem:

There have been about 34 mass shootings since 2000. Forty-seven percent — 16 — were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants, i.e. people who never would have been here but for Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act.
And the immigrant mass shootings have been some of the most spectacular ones, such as Fort Hood and San Bernardino. Two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at the Pulse Nightclub in 2016, were committed by first- and second-generation immigrants. . . .
On account of the Rule of Journalism that permits the word “immigrant” to be used only in sentences with the word “valedictorian,” you may not have heard of some of these mass shootings at all.

Omar Mateen (Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik (San Bernardino), Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Nidal Malik Hasan (Fort Hood) — Coulter’s list of immigrant killers goes on and on. If anyone at CNN or a major newspaper was willing to look seriously at this data, the question of why immigrants commit so many mass murders might arouse their curiosity. You don’t have to be a xenophobic bigot to wonder about the underlying causation. It could be that social alienation is a major contributor to mass violence, and that immigrants and their children experience higher levels of social alienation.

Democrats and their liberal media allies, however, aren’t interested in any facts or statistics or analysis about school shootings except those that support their narrative of an “epidemic” that can be blamed on gun owners, the NRA and Republicans. So they convey a distorted propaganda designed to appeal to emotions, and ignore (or demonize) anyone who cites facts that contradict the liberal narrative.



 

Category: Crime

Comments

2 Responses to “The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic’”

  1. Who Is Murdering Whom? : The Other McCain
    March 26th, 2018 @ 8:57 pm

    […] High School shooting and the resulting hysteria ginned by Democrats and their media allies (see “The Phony ‘Gun Violence Epidemic,’” March 25). There is no “epidemic” of school shootings, America’s children are […]

  2. Also, Keep in Mind That You’re Being Manipulated – Trash Town
    March 31st, 2018 @ 9:27 pm

    […] Stacy McCain reminds us that, the last post notwithstanding, school shootings are actually very rare and have been declining since the 1990s. So what is the point of all of this media coverage? Why, “Vote Democrat,” of course: […]