Anatomy of a Gun Lie

They lie to win because the truth doesn't fit their narrative.

Today we are going to pick apart this tweet:

…and its companion article:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/politics/america-mass-shootings-2023-gun-violence/index.html

…to explain in clear terms the many layers of lies that the media and the antigun activists are telling, some unwittingly and some intentionally, so we can see how those layers interact. Let’s begin.

“Mass Shooting” Semantic Fuckery

When muggles read the tweet talking about “mass shootings” they think “random spree shootings.” Their minds go back to the last bombardment of media coverage of the last spree shooting, and they are aghast that there have been 100 of them. They never open the article or read the definition of mass shooting. Here’s the definition they use:

America reached the grim number by the first week of March – record time, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

Let’s look at the most recent mass shooting according to CNN’s graphic.

Three adults and one child caught bullets in a Memphis ghetto during a drive-by or similar, and all were in stable condition at various hospitals. Nothing like the horrific spree shootings. Certainly terrible for all involved, but it’s the sort of thing that plays out on local news every day that everyone in the country regularly ignores. Gun Violence Archive sets the bar in such a way that it will go up and down with the rates of generic violence, because it’s literally just measuring generic violence.

The first layer of the lie is they bait and switch you with the definitions.

Rigging the Clock

This is the fastest we've reached this grim milestone since @GunDeaths started tracking the data in 2014.

The year of our lord two thousand fourteen. What a convenient time to start the clock. Despite what the media tried to make you believe in the twenty teens, 2014 had the lowest murder rate since 1963. It was a historic minima.

There have only been six years in the past century where the USA had a lower murder rate than 2014. The last time we had a rate as low as 2014 was the same year NASA was doing Project Mercury.

Let’s see how the first two lies fit together. First, they index something that has nothing to do with spree killings and instead is a measuring stick for ordinary violent crime. Next, they don’t bother to start their accounting for that measure during the prohibition era, nor the rise of the cocaine in the 1970s, nor the crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s, but instead they only start the clock when the USA was in a historic murder low, to ensure that their faked up measure is “on the rise.”

2020

I do not like cops. I do not own a Thin Blue Line flag. I don’t donate to FOP. Fifty percent of my experiences with police officers have been displeasing. But I’m not stupid, and I know that there are measurable reductions in crime associated with increased police presence, which means there stand to be measurable increases in crime associated with decreased police presence, especially in inner cities where most of the “mass shootings” transpire.

I’m also not blind, so when the George Floyd riots happened in 2020, and everyone in major cities started flying “All Cops Are Bastards” flags, I knew that was going to reduce police staffing. We saw a drop in total police staffing of 1.75% in 2020, and another 1.76% in 2021.

Being a gun-adjacent writer, I talk with folks who hang out with cops and they pass the stories back to me. They said in 2020 many of the cops who didn’t quit their jobs simply quit policing in dangerous areas. The fear that they would get caught on YouTube doing their job, and then get fired from their job for doing their job, led them to the conclusion that they should just quit doing their job in areas where they might lose their job for doing it.

Which meant they intentionally reduced or ceased entirely policing in black areas. 911 calls might just not get answered. Because of ACAB. There is no doubt in my mind that that’s the largest contributor for the overall rise in crime, including murder, in 2020 and 2021. The numbers predict it. And the gun-controllers are the same people who carried the ACAB flags and burnt buildings in 2020.

These same gun-controllers want to blame the 2020 gun buying spree for the crime, as if the toilet paper hoarding Covid Karens are behind the “mass shootings,” or the ordinary and reasonable black folks afraid of dirty cops are behind the “mass shootings,” or the white suburbanites afraid of Defund The Police are behind the “mass shootings,” or the political wonks afraid that Trump would win, or Biden would win, are behind the “mass shootings.” Those are the groups who bought guns in 2020. The groups doing the shooting are the criminals, who either already had guns or picked them up on the black market they day they needed them.

Now let’s see how all three of these lies fit together.

The gun-controllers intentionally riot and degrade the police force, which increases crime relative to historic lows, which they map over to “mass shootings,” which they trick people into believing are spree shootings, which they blame on guns.

Neat trick, huh?

No Correlation

As readers of HWFO since its inception in 2018 already know, there’s no bivariate correlation between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate, because the USA is so far beyond the saturation point that adding or subtracting a few million guns from our 400 million total no longer matters.

As HWFO readers know, even if you make the most generous assumptions possible to the gun control side, you’d have to buy back 86 million dollars worth of guns to avert one homicide - probably a lot more. As HWFO readers already know, the gun-controllers constantly hide suicides in the numbers to inflate them, creating fake correlations which aren’t there, and many gun control laws actually impede gun owners from taking the actions necessary to reduce their own suicide rate. And what does CNN do with this? It’s laughable.

Mental health challenges grew throughout the pandemic and violence increased, but an analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that guns made those incidences significantly more deadly. Between 2019 and 2021, all of the increase in suicides and most of the increase in homicides was from gun-related incidences. The gun suicide rate increased 10% while the non-gun suicide rate decreased.

Of course gun suicide rate went up and non-gun suicide rate went down. More people had guns available because they bought them during the riots. Non-gun suicides converted to gun suicides for the folks who bought guns, and they bought guns because of the lockdowns and ACAB.

That CNN poll, which was conducted a few weeks after the mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, found that 58% of Americans believed stricter gun control laws would reduce the number of gun-related deaths in the country.

As HWFO readers know, CNN’s very behavior partially caused the Uvalde shooting because of CNN’s Buffalo New York coverage. Science shows that media behavior creates mass shooter copy cats, increasing the net number of true spree killings by 30%. As HWFO readers know, CNN avoided referencing the Greenwood Park Mall shooting because they don’t want anyone to realize that shootings ended by concealed carrying bystanders have 12 fewer victims on average. The Greenwood Park Mall shooting, for what it’s worth, didn’t make it into the “mass shooting” database even though it was a true attempt at a spree killing, because the shooter only managed to kill three people.

And the biggest reason CNN peddles the lie is right in the article:

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress, centered his 2022 campaign on ending gun violence in the US, finding support among young voters who grew up as part of the “mass shooting generation,” as he calls it.

“We’ve seen these things and been wondering our whole lives as young people, in high school, middle school and elementary school, why? Why is this happening? Why have we not fixed this? And now we’re at a place where we can vote and we can run, and we’re going to do it,” Frost said when he won the Democratic nomination.

As a member of Generation X, I was in high school when the violent crime rate, and therefore “mass shooter” rate as defined, was double what it was when Maxwell Frost was in high school. He’s not in “mass shooting generation” because of the number of mass shootings. He’s in “mass shooting generation” because CNN.com makes money, increases crime, and increases mass shootings themselves, by lying.

He’s in “mass shooting generation” because he believes them.