Media Matters Accidently Proves Gun Control Not Needed :: 06/25/2020

Anti-gunners have a tendency to present the world as an incredibly dangerous place. They use any number they can to scare you, hoping that the fear will make you call for gun control. That’s why they lump suicides in with “gun fatalities” every single year. They know the number of homicides won’t do it alone, so they take suicides and add it in there and hope no one will notice.

Now, though, many of these same people are screaming about defunding the police, and a lot of us have had to point out how crime is getting worse amid these calls.

Over at Media Matters, though, they did their usual schtick of claiming we’re doing something sneaky and underhanded.

They even took issue with a couple of things Cam wrote.

• In a June 21 article, Bearing Arms’ Cam Edwards covered the gun violence in New York City and across the state before slamming Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s commitment to gun safety laws and complaining that “officials are still doubling down on … more gun control and fewer police officers on the street.”

…

• In a June 23 article for Bearing Arms, Edwards briefly mentioned the Minneapolis mass shooting while covering the amount of gun violence in the city over the last month. Edwards criticized the city council’s push to disband their police department, writing: “They need a law enforcement agency empowered to make arrests, and a criminal justice system that will treat violence seriously. You can’t have that if your police department’s been abolished and replaced with social workers, no matter how hard-working and well-meaning they might be.”

To be clear, Cam wasn’t the only one they wrote about, but he’s kind of relevant to us here. Now, Cam’s a big boy and he can defend himself, but what I found amusing was how Media Matters tried to justify this one.

Here’s the paragraph right before their little list.

Conservative and pro-gun media ignored the bulk of these shootings, covering only Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York City to claim this is the inevitable result of “defunding the police.” But data shows that police departments spend very little percentage of their time responding to calls about violent crimes, and no city — including those where the shootings occurred — has dismantled its police department at this point. But these media figures still suggested that there’s more violence to come if police reforms are enacted:

And after:

In actuality, police departments spend a very small amount of time responding to violent crime calls. According to The New York Times, a “handful of cities post data online showing how their police departments spend their time” and in the three cities analyzed, responding to violent crime calls made up just 4% of the officers’ shifts on average, while responding to noncriminal calls made up between 32-37%.

Now, look at the bolded part in the first paragraph and the second paragraph. Both make it clear that violent crime makes up a small amount of what officers deal with, meaning it’s a small portion of crime in total.

These are the same people who routinely present guns as this massive threat; as if only the truly fortunate can die of old age rather than be gunned down on the streets of an American city.

So, which is it? Is violent crime a virtually non-existent problem that doesn’t require nearly as much policing–and Cam never said that these departments had been defunded, but we do know they’re being heavily restrained by liberal government officials who would love to defund them–or are guns a plague that will amount to genocide?

Again, which is it, because it can’t be both.

On the other hand, we’ve never argued that guns are a problem. We’ve acknowledged time and time again that the odds of you being involved in a violent crime is low, but that we still think you should carry a gun because it’s not non-existent. This is a point we’ve remained consistent on through the years.

Media Matters, however, is at once responsible for pretending that guns are a scourge that needs to be wiped from the Earth because of violent crime while also saying that violent crime isn’t really a threat.

However, what Media Matters is also missing is that even without defunding, these departments are seeing a huge surge in violent crime, well about that 4 percent of what they normally see on a shift, because people are already thinking of a time when the department simply isn’t there. If the rhetoric wasn’t out there, it’s unlikely we’d see anything like this taking place.

Not that I’d expect them to acknowledge this tidbit.

Nor will they acknowledge that they’ve now provided sufficient evidence that maybe, just maybe, violent crime isn’t the problem the and people like them have tried to paint it as.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He's also the host of Unloaded TV on YouTube. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/06/25/proves-gun-control-not-needed/