As we all have been made painfully aware – the media is not our friend. Every day, mainstream media feeds the unwitting public only what THEY want you to see and hear – opinion, conjecture, assumptions and outright fabrications. Facts are often altered, twisted or omitted completely so the day’s “news” will fit into their biased information bubble, and then put on repeat in the 24-hour news cycle. Those of us who think freely will scoff at the lion’s share of what is said, or get frustrated about how it’s said, because we know better.
During last night’s Democrat presidential candidate debate, Joe Biden claimed that “150 million people have been killed by gun violence since 2007”. Now, I’m not a mathematician, and I’ve been known to engage in the occasional conspiracy theory, but I’m pretty sure that statistic is grossly inaccurate. I know it’s false, you know it’s false, but SOMEONE out there will take that information and run with it. Lucky for us, all the media outlets have recognized, and poked fun at, this gaffe Sleepy Joe made, but when this kind of outrageous fiction gets released into the universe, some rabid anti-gun activist will not only believe it, but perpetuate it.
I was reading an article today in a local suburban newspaper whereby a lady was complaining that “gun violence survivors” aren’t being sufficiently recognized, or allowed to grieve. I’m not quite sure what she means by that, but in this article, she claims that “Every year, we lose more than 36,000 Americans to gun violence”. Actually, the number is closer to 39,000. However, here’s how Pew Research breaks down gun-related deaths:
“What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?
Though they tend to get less attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2017, six-in-ten gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (23,854), while 37% were murders (14,542), according to the CDC. The remainder were unintentional (486), involved law enforcement (553) or had undetermined circumstances (338).”
That said, one glaring omission in all of this are the DGU (Defensive Gun Use) statistics. These are the instances where a firearm was used not to take a life, but to save or protect it. There are researchers who compile these types of stats. As an example, Kleck and Gertz provide one set of stats, National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) another. Here is how the two compare in a National Review article, dated September 12, 2019:
“It seems fair to treat the NCVS estimates as a floor and Kleck’s as a ceiling, which gives us a range of about 100,000 to 2 million DGUs per year.”
Obviously, this range is broad – there are countless variables and each situation is different. But this proves that guns DO save and protect, not just maim and kill. The church shooting in White Settlement, Texas is a great example of a trained gun owner thinking first, shooting second and saving lives. No one knows how many lives would have been lost that day if not for the “good guy with a gun”. Regardless, information such as this will rarely be portrayed in a flattering light by the mainstream media, if they report it at all. For the most part, we will ONLY be fed the bad news with regard to firearms. We will continue to be bludgeoned with images of mass shooting aftermath, crime scene tape, flashing police cruisers and traumatized witness interviews because it suits their anti-gun narrative.
Don’t buy what the media is incessantly trying to sell you. Do your own research and draw your own conclusions based on information you can find outside the 24-hour news cycle. The stories are out there, tens of thousands of them. I would tell you to “Google it”, but we all know Google is not our friend either. That’s a rant for another day.
Get armed. Get trained. Stay safe!
Karen Murray