Earlier this morning, police officers from the 73rd Precinct responded to a 911 call of a male and female shot in front of 41 New Lots Avenue. When they arrived, they discovered a male with a gunshot wound to the head and a female with multiple gunshot wounds. pic.twitter.com/uXNwmhatsO
— Chief Rodney Harrison (@NYPDDetectives) July 3, 2020
If you didn’t read Elizabeth McGuigan’s takedown of the latest attempt to associate more Americans choosing to legally purchase guns with the recent spike in crime, it’s well worth your time. She does it surgically and eloquently. But let us attack this latest bunch of B.S. more succinctly: over the last generation, America’s violent crime rate has plummeted at the same time the number of firearms Americans own has almost doubled.
In short, the problem ain’t the guns. In fact, you’d be forgiven for correlating the causation for that decades-long drop in violent crime with the very increase in civilian gun ownership the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex disdains so much. We, of course, won’t do that.
Anyway, the galaxy brains behind these latest examples of analytical legerdemain (the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Garen Wintemute’s assiduously anti-gun UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Center) have concluded that “excess gun purchases” are the reason for recent spike in shootings and gun deaths. The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham, naturally enough, swallows that argument hook, line and sinker.
Strangely enough, nowhere in his summary of the studies’ findings does Ingraham mention the terms “bail reform,” “prisoner release,” “riots” or “civil unrest” as possible contributing factors to the increase in violent crime and shootings around the country. A CTRL-F search didn’t turn up the term “hunger” either. Imagine that.
In the end, [the researchers] estimated, firearm violence nationally jumped nearly 8 percent from March through May because of excess gun-buying; that’s “776 additional injuries associated with purchasing spikes.” That may be an undercount: The Brookings study indicated gun sales jumped even higher in June, with potentially even greater effects on rates of gun violence.
The authors caution that a study of this nature cannot prove causality, particularly at a time of massive social upheaval in a country dealing with an unprecedented public health crisis as well as a nationwide protest movement.
“The risks of increased firearm availability are likely compounded by the myriad effects of the coronavirus pandemic, including widespread increases in anxiety, fear, grief, economic strain, disruptions to daily routines, and racial and economic inequities,” the authors write.
Still, they note, they accounted for as many confounding factors as possible and contend their finding is in line with a number of previous studies on the consequences of prior gun-buying binges.
– Christopher Ingraham in Spike in violent crime follows rise in gun-buying amid social upheaval