Why Do Americans Believe Gun Violence Is Rising... When It Isn't?

[ROGER4314]

This is the second article on Liberal Yahoo that actually told the truth about guns, violence and ineffectiveness of gun controls. It's a short read but a good one. They pulled the previous article off of Yahoo and this one may not last long, either. Catch it while you can!

3 reasons Americans think gun homicide is rising... when it isn't

Here's a quote:

"As the nation remains locked in a bitter debate over reducing gun violence, two new studies released Tuesday found that shooting deaths and other gun crimes have already plunged since peaking in the 1990s. There were 18,253 gun-related killings in 1993, and 11,101 in 2011, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. With population growth, that meant that the rate of gun homicides dropped by nearly 50 percent — from seven per 100,000 people in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2010, Pew Research Center reported. And non-fatal gun crimes dropped even more sharply, by 69 percent."

Flash

 

[Younggun]

They think that because that's what Obama is telling them.

 

[ROGER4314]

That pretty well describes the situation!

Flash

 

[navyguy]

Yep, Obama and his crew say this crap and it seems they are never challenged on it. Just like saying there are no background checks on internet sales. To the people who don't own or buy guns regularly this sounds like you can just log on and order an AR15 or Glock and have it shipped from anywhere in the US right to your home.

 

[ROGER4314]

We all know that Internet sales are subject to FFL paperwork and BG checks, yet the Liberals still claim otherwise. They obviously have a very low opinion of the American people when they lie about something that is so easily verified....or disproven.

Flash

 

[GrandpaOf18]

Own the press, own the 'truth'.

 

[85mackey]

Own the press, own the 'truth'.

Great quote!

 

[ROGER4314]

It's the Golden Rule. The ones with the Gold, make the rules!

Flash

 

[matefrio]

This report after Obama failed to pass a single line of gun regulation. Where were these reports back in December?

My thought is it's to take the heat off of the Administration and Dem Congressmen.

 

[General Zod]

We all know that Internet sales are subject to FFL paperwork and BG checks, yet the Liberals still claim otherwise. They obviously have a very low opinion of the American people when they lie about something that is so easily verified....or disproven.

Flash

Few people do check this sort of thing. The Dems count on uninformed voters who are too lazy to look into things for themselves. Sadly, there is never a shortage of those voters.

 

[benenglish]

Every crime with enough blood spilled goes on the news, often nationally. With the improvements in mass communications in the last 20 years including the commercial internet and the 24-hour news cycle, people see far more crime than they used to. More isn't actually happening; less is. But we see it more often.

This gives a false impression that crime, including gun crime, is rising.

I first noticed this back in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had a rep on the Donahue show (yes, I'm that old) who said with a straight face that 50,000 children a year went missing. This was at the height of one of those widespread moral panics about Satanist child molesters stealing little kids for dark rituals. (Yes, this country is sometime gullible enough to gobble up crap even that ridiculous.)

That number of 50,000 struck me as odd. I had just done a paper for school on casualties in Vietnam. We'd had just under 60K KIA in Vietnam. Every family I knew had been touched by that. But I didn't know anybody who had a missing child in their family.

So I did some research. At the time, the only good research on real numbers had been conducted by the Illinois State Police. They estimated that, across the entire U.S., some 50 to 150 of what we think of as child abductions took place, i.e. some kid is grabbed by a stranger for evil purposes.

So where did the NCMEC get that huge number? They included every missing child on file whose case hadn't been solved in each years numbers. They included children in the care of non-custodial spouses (which can be terrible, but isn't the same as a pedophile snatching them off the street.) They included runaways and throwaways. In every category, they assumed the absolute top numbers in any estimate they could find. Then they just threw in a whole bunch of plain old exaggeration.

Why? Because they had something to sell. By making the problem seem worse than it was, they managed to become the defacto authority on child abduction. They got donations. They eventually got a sort of quasi-LEA status assigned to them by the federal government allowing them to, for example, process child pornography complaints. AFAIK, they are the only people in the USA, outside of law enforcement, that are allowed to be in possession of child porn in order to study it and help consolidate/verify/investigate complaints.

They built a business out of scaring the hell out of people. To this day, there are still very few real, malevolent child abductions in this country. Yet there's an entire industry built around scaring parents, teaching children about "stranger danger" and scaring them, and (let's be honest) selling stuff to ordinary citizens who want to protect their families against these imagined threats.

The biggest of those industries is media and government. The government gets to set up task forces and trample all over our civil rights and pass "Amber Alert" legislation that shoves missing children in our faces every time one goes missing anywhere in the country. The media latches on to all this to run 24 hours of salacious garbage, constantly filling the heads of everyone with the notion that our children are in danger.

They aren't.

Now imagine all those same impulses to profit and powermongering at the expense of public service when they are turned to something that actually does happen more than occasionally - crime and, specifically, splashy crimes committed with guns that produce lots of blood and bodies. That stuff is gold for the media. They push it constantly to grab viewers. Politicians are happy to hitch a ride for all the publicity they can get.

It's no wonder people get the wrong idea. People think they are at imminent risk of attack in situations where that kind of thinking is not close to statistically sound. (Yes, I know it's not about the probability, it's about the stakes. I am a member here, aren't I?) People idiotically overprotect their precious snowflakes when, in reality, they'd produce better quality adults from their offspring if they taught them that almost no one wants to hurt them so go out and have some fun.

tl;dr - The media pushes blood in our faces 24/7, everyone with something to sell jumps on the bandwagon, and people are misled. The whole thing sucks.

BTW - I think it's a little unfair to blame Obama for the impression that any crime is rising. He's fed into fear whenever he could, especially after Sandy Hook. But any politician will feed into fear if it helps their agenda. It has always been so. Obama is less intellectually honest about it than most but, in the grand scheme of things, the USA has a history of electing a few good presidents who stand as giants of history and a whole bunch of bumblers and crooks. Bad leadership is a strong American tradition. It's too early to tell where Obama will be classified by future generations...but I know which way I'm betting.

 

[AKM]

We live in one of the most peaceful eras in history....

 

[hkusp1]

Because of the media and people are way to gullible these days.

 

[Rigante]

The media doesn't report on a building that isn't burning. The overwhelming media coverage of such events makes it appear as though it occurs more often now than in the past.

 

[matefrio]

Someone has responded that there are fewer deaths because of better medical technology.

 

[Blind Sniper]

Someone has responded that there are fewer deaths because of better medical technology.

They're right that we have better tech now compared to, say, 20 years ago, but they're wrong in thinking that the tech is what kept people alive.

 

[General Zod]

Someone has responded that there are fewer deaths because of better medical technology.

Medical technology has nothing to do with a decrease in non-fatal violent crime.

 

[ROGER4314]

Part of the problem in firearms violence statistics is in how the numbers are compiled. As far back as I remember, suicides that use firearms have been combined with numbers from murder with firearms. That is totally misleading and total bullshit. A despondent person who ends his life with a firearm is listed as a violent street murder victim killed by a firearm!

Suicides comprise approximately 1/2 of the murder with firearms statistics. It varies some but hovers usually around 50%.

See if you can justify THAT bit of statistical manipulation!

Flash

 

[Angeleyes]

the media tells its flock of sheep