While I vehemently oppose gun control and all who push it, I've often expressed some degree of respect for The Trace. Unlike a lot of journalist organizations, they're more open about their biases than others. It's easier to take them seriously because of it. I disagree with them, but they're far more honest about where they stand than most news operations.
But there's a dark side to that bias, too. It means there are no levels they won't stoop to in order to push gun control.
My evidence? A piece they recently ran trying to leverage someone taking their own life to push red flag laws.
In Natrona County, Wyoming, the Platte River runs alongside Casper Mountain, with its thick forests and astonishing vistas, and every year the local coroner assembles data into a package called the “Suicide Report.” Its mere existence implies that an area of natural beauty and splendor is contending with an unnatural, unrelenting epidemic.
On October 1, the coroner, James Whipps, a large, bald man with glasses and a goatee, sat before the Natrona County Board of County Commissioners in a bright courtroom. He did not have good news. “In the last two months, since I talked to you last, we’ve had nine suicides, and that brings us in the county to a total of 24 for the year,” he said. His voice was sober and frank, like a small-town sheriff describing an unsolved violent crime. “We still have three months of the year to go, and if the last two months are any indication, we’ll set a record that was worse than the one we set in 2021.”
According to Whipps’s data, 18 of the 24 suicides were carried out with a firearm, a slice of a statewide trend. Last year, 75 percent of suicides in Wyoming involved guns, and the state had the highest gun suicide rate in the country. Yet in March, Wyoming, under single-party Republican control, enacted a law to expressly ban red flag statutes, which have been adopted in 21 states. Red flag laws allow family members and law enforcement officials to go before a judge and make the case that a person should be temporarily disarmed because they pose an imminent risk to themself or others.
Dallas Laird, a wistful, soft-spoken 78-year-old commissioner, addressed the room. “Last week, one of my best friends’ boy shot himself and killed himself,” he said. “A boy that I’ve known his whole life. And his mother’s in Europe and his sister called me and she was in tears — I could hardly understand her.” The boy, named Ryan, called him Uncle Dallas. He went on, “I never know what to say.”
“I haven’t called his mother back yet,” he added. “Because I text her, I says, ‘I will when I know what to say. I just don’t know what to say.’”
Not that long ago, red flag laws were widely touted as a bipartisan solution to gun violence. Both Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association had endorsed them. But then the laws became a centerpiece of reform for the Biden administration, and a backlash from Second Amendment groups and the far-right ensued. Since 2020, four Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, have implemented a prohibition on such laws. The other three — Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Tennessee — are also consistently among the states with the highest gun suicide rates in the country, according to data provided by Cassandra Crifasi, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.
That's right, they're trying to leverage suicides in one sleepy part of a state with a small population, including the suicide of at least one young person, all to try and push red flag laws that even they admit only may have prevented these deaths.
Natrona County in Wyoming has a population of just under 80,000 people, most of whom live in Casper, the county seat. It's a small place, all things considered. Casper has under 60,000 people and is the second-largest city in the state. My hometown of Albany, Georgia has about 10,000 more people and we're only the 12th largest city by population in what many describe as a pretty rural state.
This matters because a small population means that small numbers of people taking their own lives hurts.
But The Trace seemingly ignores a whole lot of facts in their quest to capitalize on tragedy to push a political agenda.
For example, Wyoming has a Title 25 hold, which allows officials to admit someone suffering a mental health crisis for 72 hours. This not just removes someone from their guns for a time, but from pretty much any method of taking their own life.
Pretty much every state has some variation of this law, but it's generally ignored by anti-gun folks who are trying to push red flag laws. They seem to think it's better to take the guns away and leave a dangerous person walking around so they can hurt themselves or others in some other manner.
What bothers me about The Trace's piece here is that they're trying to capitalize on tragedy, much like anti-gunners do all the time. It's not new, but that doesn't make it any less disgusting. Stepping it dog crap isn't new, but it's still gross.
