More Evidence that the Media are Dishonest and Awful

Actual gun crime is down, but Americans’ perception is that gun crime is way up.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

The bureau also looked into non-fatal violent crimes. Few victims of such crimes — less than 1% — reported using a firearm to defend themselves.

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed  more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later this year.

It’s not hard to know what’s going on here at all. We don’t need Occam’s Razor to slice this pie up. Crimes involving guns make for compelling news coverage and generate ratings. That hyped coverage serves to forward a Democrat desire to push gun control, which for some Democrats goes all the way to a national gun registry and fully disarming all Americans. Democrats and the media both keep gun crime stories in the headlines to serve their different desires — ratings and power, and also for Democrats, distract from the economy and other issues — and as most in the media are in fact Democrats, the media gets to double-dip. They play up gun crimes, demonize gun shows, lie about the “gun show loophole,” and publish piles of incorrect stories all to push their narrative that GUNS=BAD and DEMOCRATS=GOOD. They get their ratings and support for their policy preferences at the same time.