It’s a pet peeve of mine; whenever someone – usually a smug little twerp who’s beein trained to think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, regardless of actual merit – starts out a soliloquy with “Actually…”, I usually want to smack them.<\/p>\n
Hard.<\/p>\n
So with a piece from earlier in the week from the Washington Post, by Christopher Ingraham – who is, more or less, the person I described in the first paragraph.\u00a0 \u00a0But he’s at the WaPo, so I repeat myself.<\/p>\n
And, er, “actually”,the article actually takes a radical departure – revealing a bit of the truth:<\/p>\n
\nThe study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: \u201cMost gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments,\u201d Braga and Cook found. \u201cMost attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role.\u201d Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This?\u00a0 In the WaPo<\/em>?<\/p>\n
It seems too good to be true.\u00a0 And it is exactly that, eventually.<\/p>\n
But Ingraham thinks he’s onto something:<\/p>\n
The results undercut the idea that \u201cguns don\u2019t kill people, people kill people.\u201d That catchy turn of phrase is often used by gun rights supporters to emphasize the human role in gun violence rather than the gun itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And this revelation that “undercuts” the absolute truism – the notion that perpetrators, not hardware, is responsible for crime (emphasis added)?<\/p>\n
\nAnalyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip J. Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality<\/strong> than those with a smaller-caliber gun.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In other words – bigger guns are more lethal.<\/p>\n
This is what you get from\u00a0America’s most respected journalistic outlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n
No word on whether large calibers make a firearm self-animating.<\/p>\n
Maybe that’ll be on NPR…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a pet peeve of mine; whenever someone – usually a smug little twerp who’s beein trained to think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, regardless of actual merit – starts out a soliloquy with “Actually…”, I usually want to smack them. Hard. So with a piece from earlier in the week from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tc-media-bias","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67568,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67567\/revisions\/67568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}