Giffords Blew It in Touting Gun Control's Efficacy

AP Photo/Philip Kamrass, File

For quite some time, Democrats have been campaigning on the idea that contrary to what Republicans have said, violent crime is down. The Biden administration is handling things and there's no reason for anyone to be concerned about being gunned down in a parking lot over their cell phone or car keys.

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However, that seemed to ring hollow to a whole lot of people. After all, the news reports sure don't look like violent crime is down.

Yet a whole lot of people had a lot vested in telling you that it was, particularly gun control groups like Giffords. After all, President Joe Biden signed a major gun control bill into law.

And Giffords has touted the effects of that law. After all, violent crime is down and all that.

Unfortunately for them, that's now biting them in the kiester.

Giffords can’t keep track any more if crime is down or up and whether Americans are allowed to be concerned about their safety. Just one month ago, they joined the chorus in repeating President Joe Biden’s claims that violent crime in America had been greatly reduced because of his gun control agenda.

“President Biden is right: ‘If you’re trying to talk about reducing crime and violence in America, you need to talk about guns in America.’ [President Biden] has taken historic action to keep guns from falling in the wrong hands. Thanks to his leadership, violent crime is down,” the gun control group posted on social media.

As the saying goes – garbage in, garbage out. It turns out gun control groups and the Biden-Harris administration were crowing loudly about data that was severely flawed. Last week, a Real Clear Investigation report revealed the FBI “stealth edited” crime data back in 2021 and 2022 which led to their 2023 report showing crime had in fact increased recently by 4.5 percent, compared to the originally stated 2.1 percent decrease. Don’t hold your breath for Giffords or The White House to issue corrections.

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That's bad enough all on its own, but one could forgive them for getting it wrong when the data actually said that. We have no way of knowing that they were privy to the real information any more than we were. I'd still have a field day with it, mind you, because the correction completely undermined the entire premise of what they'd been saying, but at least I can see how they'd made the mistakes.

The problem is that crime was only down when it was convenient for it to be down.

However, the “crime is down” narrative regurgitated by Giffords wasn’t the same message that they recently voiced in a press release attacking U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).

“Today, the national gun violence prevention organization GIFFORDS, founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, criticized Rep. Mike Lawler for accepting financial support from the corporate gun industry’s trade association while gun violence remains a threat to families in the Lower Hudson Valley,” a press release noted.

The group is attacking Rep. Lawler – one of the most bipartisan Members of Congress – in hopes of knocking him off in favor of their endorsed candidate former U.S. Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).

Apparently, all the gun control laws that Giffords pushes on law-abiding New Yorkers haven’t made them any safer, according to their own press release. Don’t forget former Rep. Gabby Giffords, the founder of her namesake gun control group, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent gun control bill signing ceremony.

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Whoops.

This is what gun control advocates do. They tout any improvement in the crime rate as both all because of their efforts and still pretend that the issue is so horrific we need to curtail more of our rights.

And now that we know that there wasn't an improvement at all, what we'll hear is that the reason it didn't improve is because the law didn't do enough.

For them, a gun control law never fails in and of itself, it only "fails" because lawmakers didn't go far enough. 

Yet when crime does drop following a gun control law's passage, they claim that it worked great and if lawmakers had done more, it would have dropped more.

In their minds, there's no set of circumstances where gun control doesn't work.

Because of that, they don't mind being a bit hypocritical to unseat someone they don't like and put someone they do in that office. What's a little hypocrisy to them?

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