Inner City Gun Violence

Blame the NRA. So goes the chant, rising from the fevered minds of legions of adolescents. We congratulate them on become the tools of the anti-gun movement, but we must recognize, and emphasize, that when you blame the NRA for shootings you are exonerating the shooters.

Somehow or other, we are more concerned with stigmatizing the NRA than in stigmatizing those who commit gun violence. This cannot be a deterrent to those who would shoot their neighbors.

In the case of Nikolas Cruz, as we and many others have mentioned, the attack on the NRA has also exonerated the government agencies and officials who failed the Parkland community-- from the FBI to the sheriff’s office to state welfare agents. Everyone knew about Cruz and no one did anything about him. Sounds like a good time to blame the NRA and to save Scott Israel’s career.

The newly-minted student activists want to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines… and yet, when it comes to gun violence in America, they are not really the problem.

Besides, why isn’t anyone talking about inner city gun violence? The city of Chicago, like Philadelphia and Baltimore has been a shooting gallery. These cities have stringent gun control laws, and yet, they are havens for homicidal maniacs. No one has anything to say about that. No one, except The Daily Caller… which comes to us from the Weasel Zippers blog, via Maggie’s Farm.

If we examine the facts, most everyday shootings are committed by people who use handguns, not rifles. The Daily Caller explains:

Meanwhile, if gun control advocates were actually serious about gun violence, they’d be talking about places like Chicago and they’d lobby for further regulation of or outright ban on the sale of handguns. Yes, the real numbers actually show rifles are among the safest firearms for an American to own. According to the FBI, Americans are roughly 20 times more likely to die at the end of a handgun.

Yet, handguns are definitively not part of the script the media follows when a mass shooting occurs in America. First, blue check marks start tweeting for gun control while the bodies are still warm. Second come the spin masters like Bloomberg’s anti-gun Everytown USA, which got basically the entire media to repeat a wildly false statistic that 18 school shootings had occurred in 2018. Third come the “thoughtful” and “powerful” opeds, lately from veterans quick to use their service as a lecturing device.

The New York Times printed an op-ed about the problem. The Daily Caller calls it out:

We get scary posts on the AR-15 like this one from a two-time Pulitzer recipient at The New York Times, which notes that “173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s, according to a New York Times analysis.” Of course, the article — which reads like a less dishonest version of a press release from Everytown — is missing the context on handguns. How else would they have fit in the swipe at the NRA, the quote from a military veteran for gun control, and all the terrifying language about the infantry’s use of AR-15s?

If we’re to restrict gun deaths to just mass shootings, according to Statista (which uses the FBI’s methodology), handguns are about twice as likely to be used as rifles. We saw the results of handguns on soft targets in the Ft. Hood and Charleston church shootings. Except that it’s much easier to conceal a handgun, there is virtually no difference between a semi-automatic handgun and a rifle when it comes to attacking a close-quarters, defenseless environment like a school or a church.

Keep in mind, the Daily Caller points out, 173 deaths over an eleven year period is roughly a quarter of the number of deaths by gunfire in Chicago in one year. IN ONE YEAR. Put that one in your pipe and smoke it:

The “173 deaths since 2007” number is also highly misleading out of context. Roughly four times that number died by gunfire in Chicago in a single year.

Still, not a word about Chicago gun violence from the media and gun control advocates in this recent cycle, while they loudly claim to be the white knights of gun violence.

Apparently, black lives do not matter quite as much.