Over the weekend, NPR came out with a “Fact Check” piece about whether Chicago is “proof” that gun laws don’t affect crime.
Is the “fact check”, well, factual?
It’s NPR and they’re talking about guns. What do you think?
NPR starts with Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ post-Vegas press conference statement:
“I think one of the things we don’t want to do is try to create laws that won’t stop these types of things from happening,” Sanders said Monday. “I think if you look to Chicago where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there.”
Pointing to Chicago to suggest that gun laws don’t work is not a new talking point — Trump claimed Chicago had “the toughest gun laws in the United States” in a 2016 presidential debate; his fellow Republican candidate Chris Christie likewise pointed to Chicago as a place with high crime despite tight gun laws.
Now, if you’re a Right to Keep and Bear Arms person, you know what that really means; the idea that tight regulations on law-abiding civlilians owning guns hasn’t the foggiest impact on crime, at best, and a negative impact at worst. That – crime and death, and how infringing freedom for the law-abiding doesn’t affect either – is what we’re concerned about.
And what does NPR focus on?
The Fussy Tangent: Hey, at least NPR acknowledges the real problem, sort of:
It’s also true that there were more than 4,000 shooting victims in Chicago in 2016. It’s also true that Chicago has suffered a massive amount of gun crime recently. In 2016, homicides in Chicago sharply rose, mostly as a result of gun homicides, as the University of Chicago crime lab found in a January report.
Gun homicides in the city rose by 61 percent between 2015 and 2016. That helped make the gun homicide rate…25.1 per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 14.7 in Philadelphia and just 2.3 in New York.
But never mind all the carnage and death. It’s Huckabee-Sanders’ assertion that’s the real issue!
But it’s not true that Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the country, as other fact checkers have also repeatedly found…”We generally think of California as having the strongest gun laws in the country,” said Hannah Shearer, a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The whole state’s laws are pretty strong.”
The center has given California an A rating and ranks it No. 1 in terms of the tightness of its gun laws.
Ah. So law-abiding citizens are disarmed, and criminals are deterred only by the ministrations of the Chicago Police Department – but they’re not the “toughest” laws, according to the abstract reasoning of a gun grabber group?
This is not a “fact check”. This is an ideological purity test.
It gets worse.
The Mean Streets Of Hammond: NPR next revisits the old canard; Chicago would be safe, if it weren’t for those darned Hoosiers and Badgers:
It’s important to remember here that Chicago is very close to two states that have relatively weak gun laws: Wisconsin and Indiana. So while it’s easy to pick on Chicago (or any other high-crime city) for its ugly statistics, says one expert, taking bordering states into account weakens this gun-advocacy talking point.
“It’s not a scientific study. It’s an anecdote,” said Philip Cook, a professor of public policy studies at Duke University. “They might have pointed to Washington, D.C., back in the days when D.C. banned handguns and yet had high gun-violence rates. Those bans are only at best partially effective, because the borders are permeable.”
So why aren’t Indiana, Wisconsin and Virginia stacking up bodies like cordwood? If availability of guns were the problem, then wouldn’t places like North Dakota, New Mexico and Wyoming be shooting galleries?
NPR does try to drill further into the issue:
A 2015 study of guns in Chicago, co-authored by Cook, found that more than 60 percent of new guns used in Chicago gang-related crimes and 31.6 percent used in non-gang-related crimes between 2009 and 2013 were bought in other states. Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns.
Other evidence corroborates this — a 2014 Chicago Police Department report found that Indiana accounted for 19 percent of all guns recovered by the department between 2009 and 2013.
NPR has found correlation, not a cause. Yes, there are guns from other states to fill the black market demand for firearms. Every single one of them is the result of a felony – a theft (a state felony) or a “straw purchase”, a person with a clean record buying a buy and giving/selling it to a criminal, which is a federal felony.
Is it because Indiana has “lax” gun laws?
Or is it because the US Attorney for Northern Illinois announced that his office wasn’t going to spend time prosecuting “straw buyers” anymore? Because he wanted to focus his office on politically-sexy prosecutions, and nobody ever got elected to the Senate by showing off a record of prosecuting gang-bangers’ girlfriends, junior high pals and grandmothers?
So, In Summary: The NPR “fact-check” ignored the actual point of the Trump Administration’s statement – that gun control and public safety are not in any way linked, and in some cases may be inversely correlated – to pedantically nitpick Huckabee Sanders’ conceptually accurate statement about the legalities, and issue a deflection about other states’ laws that actually reinforces the Pro-Civil Rights’ side’s point.
Facts In The Dark rules this article as part of the NPR’s effort to be part of Big Left’s Praetorian Guard.
May I jack this thread for a moment?
California passed a law that specifically orders LEO’s not to cooperate with the federal government.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-brown-california-sanctuary-state-bill-20171005-story.html
Now, I am fully in favor of defying the feds at every opportunity, but do you think those dimwits realize this is *exactly* how the civil war started? I mean exactly.
I’m sure most SITD readers are familiar with the nullification crisis of 1820 (Dunning_Kruger and teh Peevee can find it at wikipedia).
This trend started with marijuana, and has now spread to immigration. What’s next?
For the record, I’m sure most of my fellow South Carolinians join me in endorsing California’s action, and I could even see us fighting for their right to engage in this act of rebellion…of course, if they should prevail, we would build a wall at their border. And they would get no help when Mexico acts to reclaim their territory.
As it stands, I have written my state reps & Governor to demand commercial and private traffic from California be stopped for inspection at our state line, to ensure they are not smuggling illegals, or ganj.
Moderation is hell…
Especially when you’re trying to jack a thread!
It is all about the narrative. Whoever controls the lies, controls the “truth”.
BTW, does anyone still listen to NPR?MPR? Other then to fisk it?
And yet NPR keeps using the “g-word” – gangs – in the report. As in, “Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns.” And they can’t seem to make the connection.
Northern Indiana is also heavily populated with gangs, btw. You’ve got your Mennonites, Amish, Church of the Brethren, Nazerites and more, living cheek by jowl.
Follow the link to the 2015 study. TL;DR version: Guns carried by gang members tend to be 10 years old, were initially sold out-of-state, and were acquired from a friend. Study Conclusion: the problem is straw purchasers and perhaps interstate traffickers in stolen guns. My Conclusion: no law can prevent people from lying and stealing.
JD: Isn’t stealing against the law? Isn’t lying about the true intended owner of a gun at time of purchase from the FFL against the law? That should have stopped this. That and the “No guns allowed” signs under the Chicago city limit signs……
NW; well, you do have Gary, but of course the left does not want to pay attention to the obvious ills of Gary, starting with the fact that a huge portion of the city is unwed parents on welfare. And it’s quite frankly surreal to consider that anti-gun activists aren’t figuring out that noting the absence of Chicago-sold guns in a city without stores selling them is not evidence, but a tautology.
And even more sad that people lamenting the carnage in Chicago aren’t figuring out that the reasons are the same as in Gary; too many unwed parents on welfare. Of course, that doesn’t work well with liberal dogma, does it?
The quoted stats are goofy — who cares whether they are shot by an old or new gun, and without knowing the absolute numbers it is impossible to know how bad the problem of gang gun crime is.
Is there a word for when your opponent in a debate makes your best argument for you? Despite having very tough gun laws, guns bought in Illinois are used to commit a significant portion of gun crimes, maybe most of them.
I am not a statistician, but the ability to easily and legally purchase a firearm seems to correlate loosely with gun crimes, while age, sex, and race of perpetrator and victim correlate tightly with gun crime. It is the “elephant in the room.”
A 2015 study of guns in Chicago, co-authored by Cook, found that more than 60 percent of new guns used in Chicago gang-related crimes and 31.6 percent used in non-gang-related crimes between 2009 and 2013 were bought in other states. Indiana was a particularly heavy supplier, providing nearly one-third of the gang guns and nearly one-fifth of the non-gang guns.
Other evidence corroborates this — a 2014 Chicago Police Department report found that Indiana accounted for 19 percent of all guns recovered by the department between 2009 and 2013.
Why not solve this problem by outlawing homicide?
See, wasn’t that easy?
Just FYI, there is very little gang-related crime of any kind in Hawaii because we don’t have gangs. Maybe NPR should look into gangs being the cause of all gang-related crime.
And let’s not forget that Gary has about half the per-capita murder rate of Chicago.
Mitch, Gary had 50 homicides in 2015 among 80,000 people, a rate of about 80:100k. The place is so (expletive) scary that non-black minorities won’t move in despite abundant low cost housing. Chicago’s bad at about 28:100k (762 among 2.7 million last year), but Gary is in a class by itself, sad to say.
Yes, you’d get comparable numbers in the worst Chicago neighborhoods with similar social pathologies, of course. Which is, of course, the real question.
Oops, 62:100k. But you get the picture.
“Just FYI, there is very little gang-related crime of any kind in Hawaii because we don’t have gangs.”
I see you’ve never had a run-in with a Somoan. 😉
“Samoan” isn’t a gang! It is a member of a somewhat autonomous Polynesian nation.
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One might point out that a run in with one Samoan explicitly does not indicate a gang, no? I had at least thought that gangs were groups of men, not individuals. :^)