New York Times Uses Study by Left Leaning Group to Push Gun Control

The New York Times had a story yesterday touting a new study by "a leading liberal group that supports toughened gun control," the Center for American Progress, that claims firearm related deaths in states with "weaker laws" are more than three times as high as in those states with "tougher restrictions."

Mark Twain (among others), is noted for a saying he attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."  This comes to mind when you look at the study and its list of states on page 21 and find that Illinois is listed among the ten states with the lowest rate of firearm related deaths (it actually has the lowest according to the study).  Chicago is in Illinois and it already has almost 600 murders committed with a firearm, and there is still a little over two months left in the year.  Chicago has some of the strictest firearms laws in the nation even after Heller and McDonald and it hasn't stopped criminals from getting a firearm.  Maybe rather than look at Illinois as a whole, they should look at areas within those states and see what the murder rate is in Chicago and a comparable city in a pro-rights state, then make a comparison.

If the NRA paid for or did a similar study to prove states with few restrictions on firearms ownership are safer than states with many restrictions, the New York Times would say it is just propaganda funded by the "gun lobby" (actually, the gun ban lobby already does that with studies conducted by people like John Lott).  But the Times treats this study as gospel and uses it to promote ballot initiatives in California, Nevada, Washington and Maine.

Glenn Reynolds: The New York Times Diverts Attention From Obama Foreign Policy Failures to Guns

Following up on yesterday's post on William McGurn's Wall Street Journal Op/Ed on why liberals push gun control, I found this piece by Professor Glenn Reynolds, thanks to Sebastian, on the New York Times using this very strategy to divert attention away from Obama's foreign policy failures with their front page editorial on gun control:

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a front-page editorial — its first since 1920 — on the subject of gun control. This led Jonah Goldberg to comment:

“The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on.”

So is the Times editorializing now because gun control is more important than Pearl Harbor? Or because Obama is in trouble? Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Reynolds closes by saying when you’re shouting and pounding the table as the Times did last week, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.

New York Times Shills for Brady Campaign on Suicide and Guns

The New York Times has this editorial promoting a new "report" released by the Brady Campaign that claims states with higher rates of gun ownership also have a higher rate of suicide:

If it takes a sensational statistic to spur national concern about such self-destruction, consider the latest research showing that 82 percent of teenage suicides by firearms involve guns left poorly secured or foolishly unprotected by members of their families. These young lives are impulsively lost in supposedly safe home environments, where just the presence of a gun has been found to increase the risk of suicide three times, according to a new report by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun safety organization.

Violent crime has been falling now for some twenty years and at the same time six in ten Americans believe that a gun in the home makes them safer.  It seems the Times, and Brady, hope that focusing on suicide numbers will change that statistic in their favor.  But, as fellow blogger Sebastian noted yesterday in his coverage of the Brady report, saying that a gun in the home makes suicide three times more likely is like saying having alcohol in the home makes you three times more likely to die from liver disease:

There are some areas where statistical analysis is useful, but this is not one of those cases. This would be like arguing that having a gun in the home makes it three times more likely you’ll rob a bank. Or perhaps having a bottle of liquor in the home makes it three times more likely that you’ll die from cirrhosis of the liver. Could be high-speed internet links make it 3x more likely you’ll download kiddie porn. All these things may statistically be true, but they are meaningless when applied to individuals.

I am not and have never been suicidal. If you’re not a bank robber, you’re not going to suddenly decide to rob a bank just because there’s a gun around. If you’re not an alcoholic, that statistic is meaningless to you, regardless of the presence of alcohol in your home. You get the picture.

I would say if you have a tendency to be suicidal, you have a loved one with a tendency toward suicidal behavior, or is just generally troubled, you’ll want to take precautions if you own guns. Perhaps gun ownership itself isn’t a wise thing for you in some circumstances. I have no disagreement with that notion.

The Times also takes its customary swipe at the "gun lobby" and the "firearms industry" for being "engaged in a reckless campaign to have more Americans own and carry guns" without out noting that the firearms community is doing more to make sure unintended fatalities involving firearms don't occur than any other group.

Suicide is tragic, but the vast majority of gun owners and Americans do not have suicidal tendencies, so having a gun in the home will not change that fact. 

One last note, according to the World Health Organization, both Japan and France have a higher rate of suicide than the U.S. while also having much more restrictive gun laws (in fact just about every country above the U.S. has stricter gun laws).

2011 Rankings by the World Health Organization



Hat tip to Sebastian for noting Japan's higher rate of suicide.