It’s another day and that means another day for the media to make false claims about guns while mocking 2nd Amendment advocates as “crazies” and “fanatics.”
In today’s New York Times Opinion section, author and contributor Timothy Egan argued that gun-related mass shootings is on the rise and it’s due to lax laws on obtaining them. He managed to weave in slams against “the fanatics” and the “gun crazies” while doing it, of course. This IS the New York Times.
He goes on to assert that it’s safer to live in states with harsh gun laws. “Better to go to a city or state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re playing the odds. Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun deaths,” Egan wrote.
But is that really the case? Egan provides his reasoning by linking to lefty outlet The Atlantic. Its 2011 article makes the claim that states with more gun laws result in fewer gun deaths, using stats from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Egan’s solution to gun violence seems to rest on increased “no gun zones” enforced by metal detectors and security screenings at public places such as malls and movie theaters. Hmm, wonder how much that’s going to cost taxpayers?
But the Times misses the mark. The data referenced uses the number of deaths due to firearms per 100,000 population by state alone. But that is ignoring the much more telling data found by looking at gun violence in major cities under stringent gun laws.
Where are the most violent places to live in the United States? Egan claims it’s the South.
“Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the South. The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the place with the highest rate of gun ownership. More guns, easily obtained by the mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun deaths.”
Egan is wrong-- and not just about his misplaced malice towards “religious fanatics and anti-government extremists.” Looking at specific locations reveals a very different picture of gun violence.
According to the CDC, the most recent numbers show L.A. and Chicago as ranking in the top two for gun murders in the U.S. They were followed by New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Washington and San Francisco. Chicago and New York, in particular, are notorious for their very strict gun laws, yet they top the list in violent gun-related crime.
Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, all made Business Insider’s “50 Most Violent Cities in the World,” list which measured homicides per 100,000 residents .
But that’s only a small part of what Egan got wrong.
Scholar and gun rights advocate John Lott, who has written extensively on the issue of gun control, spoke to MRC Culture to give a rebuttal to Egan’s misinformation.
Egan states in his piece that bystander victims can be a result of guns being used by “good guys” who try to take out the bad guy. But Lott told MRC Culture says there is “not one single example” where this has happened. In fact, his research shows mass shootings are often prevented by good guys with guns and these shootings are “underreported by the media.”
Egan also claims that if more malls had guns banned from the premises, like the Mall of America does, then there would be fewer shootings. But Lott says this is not true, citing two mall shootings in gun-free-zones. “There are malls that allow concealed handgun permit holders all across the U.S. What is interesting is that the shootings in the malls keep on occurring in those mall that have posted gun-free signs,” Lott wrote in an email.
Furthermore, Egan’s claim that “waves of mass shooting continue” “every few weeks now” is hyperbolic. Data shows that mass public shootings rate has remained relatively flat in the past 40 years, according to Lott.
But Egan is a gun control “True Believer,” and no amount of facts will change that. He ends his piece by claiming that the 2nd Amendment is “a freedom that has become a tyranny in itself.”
