Stolen guns represent a huge problem for everyone. The truth of the matter is that most of the firearms used in crime are stolen from a lawful purchaser. As such, stolen guns are used to justify taking our right to keep and bear arms.

So we all have a stake in dealing with them.

NBC News has apparently noticed that guns are being stolen out of cars with a certain frequency, and they’re going to tell you just how awful it is.

More guns are being stolen out of vehicles in many U.S. cities, according to a new data analysis, which was first obtained and independently verified by NBC News. It’s an alarming trend as shootings rise nationwide, propelled in large part by firearms obtained illegally.

I’m going to jump in here and applaud NBC News for acknowledging what we’ve been saying for a while not, that guns used in crime are obtained through illicit means.

Now, if they would stop pretending that measures impacting lawful gun owners only would stop that, we’d be in business.

Moving on…

From 2019 to 2020, at least 180 cities saw a rise in gun thefts from vehicles, which now makes up the largest source of stolen guns, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. The study analyzed FBI crime data from 2011 to 2020, spanning up to 271 small-to-large cities across 38 states.

The nonprofit, which advocates gun violence prevention, found that in 2020, an estimated 77,000 guns were reported stolen in these 271 cities alone. Of those, more than half were taken out of vehicles — a stark difference from a decade ago, when the majority of gun thefts were from burglaries and less than a quarter were from cars, according to Everytown.

On Aug. 3, 2021, Caroline Schollaert was inside her Jacksonville, Florida, home when she witnessed a man breaking into her car.

Known by many for her fearless disposition, Schollaert, an off-duty U.S. Coast Guard member, reported the burglary by phone to the local sheriff’s office, then walked outside and confronted the man at gunpoint herself.

She ordered him to stay put until authorities arrived. But while she was still on the phone with a police dispatcher, the suspect pulled out a gun of his own and opened fire. Schollaert, 26, who had just gotten engaged three days earlier, died from her injuries.

The handgun used to kill her, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said, had been stolen from an unlocked vehicle in the same neighborhood 11 days before the shooting.

First, let’s just say that Schollaert should be alive today. There’s absolutely no reason she shouldn’t be.

However, it illustrates that if you’re going to have a gun on you and point it at someone, you damn well better be willing to pull that trigger before they can.

Yet let’s be real here. The problem extends beyond Schollaert. What happened to her shouldn’t have, but why include her in a story about the overall problem?

This is a process the media uses to humanize a story.

You see, statistics alone don’t make an impression. A single death is a tragedy while a million is a statistic, as the saying goes. So, they try to make it a tragedy. They take a single person, preferably an attractive woman with a great deal of positive going on with her life, and then it’s snuffed out.

The goal is to trigger the reader’s emotions to the point that they’re willing to do anything to address such a tragedy.

It’s manipulation.

While Schollaert should be alive, her death also shouldn’t be used to try and advance an agenda, and that’s exactly what’s happening here.

No one supports stolen guns, but groups like The Trace and Everytown–both of whom are references in the article–aren’t interested in anything but gun control. They want your guns and will do what they can to get them. And they’ll use any death they can to create that world.