Look at any report in the mainstream media about so-called gun violence and it'll become clear that this is a massive problem in the United States. It's why the gun control organizations out there keep pushing their anti-gun narrative. It's all an attempt at identifying the alleged problem and trying to offer a solution to said problem.
And let's be real here. There's no acceptable amount of "gun violence." On murders, with a gun or anything else, the only acceptable number is zero. While that's not realistic, it's not something we should just shrug off, either. We should always strive to make things better, even if they don't particularly suck as bad as they did.
But the issue with guns is that the gun itself is treated as if its the greatest scourge of our time, and that Americans are being killed in job lots because we won't enact "commonsense gun reform" or something.
Yet that's not remotely the case, as Jonathan Goldstein notes in a recent column.
The actual data show homicides are fourteenth and accounted for fewer than one percent of all deaths in the United States in 2023. That’s behind heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney failure, liver disease, suicide, Covid-19, influenza/pneumonia, and drug overdoses.
In other words, you have less of a chance of dying from a homicide than you do from any of the above-named causes.
And yet, media coverage focuses more on homicides than on any of these thirteen other death causes that surpass it.
Just behind homicides in media coverage is terrorism, even though terrorism in 2023 accounted for less than .001 percent of all deaths in the United States.
“If it bleeds it leads” may make for good headlines, but it doesn’t contribute to accuracy in media or to good firearms public policy.
When it comes to trends in gun-related deaths, the misperceptions become even more apparent.
For example, what if I told you that as recently as several years ago, the firearms accident death rate had fallen to an all-time low of 0.2 per 100,000 people. This is down 94 percent since the all-time high in 1904. What’s more, since 1930 the annual number of firearm accident deaths has decreased 81 percent at a time when the US population has more than doubled and the number of firearms is up five times.
Again, "if it bleeds it leads."
Though I hate to defend the mainstream media, the truth of the matter is that the media didn't just make that up. It's a reaction to what people actually bought a newspaper to read. Good news doesn't grab people's attention very much, so a drop in the accidental firearm-related death rate dropping to an all-time low is never going to be as interesting as a spike in the murder rate.
But that doesn't really excuse the press acting like everyone is lucky to die of natural causes versus being shot when that's not remotely true. Hell, there are some causes of death listed above that seem awful enough that I think I'd prefer a bullet to the brain. I remember my uncle dying of Alzhiemer's, after all. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
Look at that list at the top of the quoted section for a moment. COVID-19 resulted in more deaths in 2023, for crying out loud, than homicides. That's all-cause homicide, too, just just "gun murders." And while COVID occupied a lot of press in 2020 and 2021, it accounted for a much smaller amount of American's anxiety about the world in 2023.
You're more likely to die from heart disease, diabetes, or cancer than you are from a gunshot, yet where are the massive debates on controlling sugar or bacon?
Don't get me wrong, I'd oppose those measures just as strongly as I oppose gun control, but at least it would be ideologically consistent for them to focus on the actual leading causes of death.
"But children!"
Yeah, yeah, I know the studies that claim so-called gun violence is the leading cause of death in children. I also know that it includes legal adults aged 18 and 19, and excludes children under one year of age, all in order to create that impression. It's because people need to be afraid in order to give up their freedoms, and if they realize just how unlikely it is that they'll die by gunshot, they're unlikely to get worked up about restricting guns.
"If it bleeds, it leads," is a newsroom mantra, and for a reason, but let's not forget that when you're dealing with newsrooms that also don't care about objectivity, the mantra gets used to create a narrative that will be used to push infringements on civil liberties.
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