The Brady folks often can’t talk about this issue without spinning a tale. I think what often surprises me is that sometimes the data can make a case for them, even without the tale. It’s like they are so strongly committed to the deception, that they can’t break their mental mindset. Such is the case with this latest article, guest written by Griffin Dix, Ph.D, talking about how wonderful California’s gun laws are. A model for the nation:
Before 1997 California’s firearm mortality rate was consistently higher than that of the rest of the nation. But as California’s gun laws took effect the state’s gun death rate dropped lower. Of course many factors besides gun laws affect firearm mortality rates.
There’s that sleight of hand again, discussing firearms mortality rates, of which the vast majority of which will be suicides. But if you look at overall violent crime and murder, from the data appearing at this source here, and here, you can see that California still has a violent crime rate significantly higher than the nation as a whole, despite the fact that the vast majority of the rest of the population lives under what Brady would classify as unacceptably weak gun laws.
Perhaps it is a desire on the part of the Bradys to make gun control look more miraculous. Maybe they feel it doesn’t make for so compelling a case to suggest that California’s murder and violent crime rates are indeed dropping faster than the rest of the nation, without controlling for other factors. Or perhaps they recognize the number of potential donors impacted by suicides is larger, and wish to cultivate that potential donor pool more than victims of criminal activity?
UPDATE: I used a stacked graph by mistake, so the numbers were shifted. It is corrected now.
From your Graphs, it looks like in 2010, Kalifornia had a Murder Rate of about 10 per 100,000, while the Nat’l Avg. was 5 per 100,000. So, using facts, not Junk Science, it seems to me on average, a person is twice as likely to be Murdered in Kalifornia than in the rest of the Country.
Wonder why that wasn’t mentioned in the Article?
The chart appears to be ??? CA had a 4.9 murder rate in 2010, National was 4.8 (according to Sebastian’s links).
I may have used the wrong graph type. Correcting.
It’s easy to ascribe purpose to a broken methodology, when perhaps it is quite possible that their movement has lost so much steam that the truly smart thought leaders have gone elsewhere.
Witness the catcalls on Facebook and the rapid disintegration of their points into elementary name calling. People with true thought leaders do not do this – at least not the “leaders” of an entire national movement.
The new gun control leaders are young, brash and frankly a little naive. Even the older members may have been thrust into expanded roles for which they were not quite ready. Their inexperience is evident in their many mistakes.
Before we get too cocky, we need to remember that great leaders come not from a mold, but from the ability to recognize their failures and learn from them. In the “Gun Control 2.0” crowd has some truly gifted people in it that are simply lost in the inexperience of it all, they are getting a crash course that will make them much more effective in the future.
That’s why this is a race. We are winning, but we need to keep our foot on the gas as best we can while not losing control of ourselves.
We also have a much larger pool to draw from.
Thanks for calling them out on this BS.
I suspect that after years of looking at the data, the more intelligent people at Brady and VPC understand that gun control does not reduce violent crime, but they get paid to advance this cause so they distort, mislead and obfuscate. We just have to keep countering their deception.
Brady / VPC just can’t stop lying.
I have felt for a long time that guns have little or nothing to do with crime on a macro scale. Guns matter to individuals stuck in rare dangerous moments, and our rights should be strongly protected for that reason alone. But the idea that some inanimate object (gun, voodoo doll, whatever) can somehow modify the cultural behaviors of an entire society is a stretch.
The causes of crime are complex and seem to change over time. I don’t think there is an easy answer – guns, jail, poverty, blah, blah…
Our side must be real careful when linking guns and crime. Today those lines seem to be going the right way, but if history tells us anything it is that crime will bounce back. Brady made the mistake (critical one, I think) of saying more guns would mean more crime. That proved demonstrably wrong, though for a little while (mid-90s post AWB) crime did go down while the ban was in effect. It was looking good for them, but it was all just two coincidental events in parallel.
I think we risk making the same mistake. Fast forward five years. America has protected carry and stronger rights than today. We are still winning and fighting over the little things to make life easier for us. But then crime goes up. Can they now say it is the fault of the gun?
We shouldn’t be linking inanimate objects to human behavior, lest we end up blaming one for the other. And does anyone think that making Chicago Shall-Issue will suddenly end all gang violence in the city (103 wounded in the last week)?
Of course not.
Like free speech and freedom of religion, this right has broad societal implications but is mostly an individual right. That is quite enough to get where we need to be. Let’s not drink too much Kool Aid and make claims about complex human conditions that no society has ever been able to completely control. If guns fixed all crime, there would never have been a debate.
I agree completely. Brady Bunch types like to trumpet “correlation is not causation!”, and we would do well to remember that. On the other hand, we would also do well to point out where, like in California, compared to the rest of the nation, the trend is down in both states, and California *still* has high murder rates, despite the laws against them.
Brady Bunch types are the ones who make the claim that “high gun ownership causes crime”; it’s a claim that’s been disproven time and time again. We should continue to emphasize this, and reinforce *our* position: high crime or low, law-abiding individuals have the right to defend their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, and to resist tyranny if the time ever comes that armed resistance is appropriate.