Don’t Believe Fake News: Murder Is Down in America

The left really, really wants your guns. The impending Democratic House has made it a clear priority. They have been blitzing us with every story and tactic they can find, and it’s been exhausting. They don’t care that mass shootings are down in the U.S. this year and up across Europe and the globe. They hide the fact that armed citizens have stopped unbelievable numbers of crimes. They just want your guns, and they’ll do anything to push that agenda.

CBS is onboard, and their latest article is a doozy. It’s circulating as a damnation of the 2nd Amendment, but when you take a closer look, something else entirely emerges.

The CBS Story

This story has been referenced enough times lately to make you want to vomit. The CBS story is titled “Gun death statistics: CDC study says gun deaths are on the rise after years of decline.” According to this title, gun deaths are up. You already know that leftists like to conflate gun deaths with homicide, but technically, this headline does reflect a real study and its results.

The body of the title even correctly identifies a lot of findings by the study. They saw an increase in homicide and suicide, and the study discovered a large trend reversal from decadal data. In short, a two-year period saw a 24-percent rise in gun homicides after roughly a decade of those numbers dropping.

Then, the article goes on to try and correlate this rise in homicide with a rise in gun ownership. Again, these data are technically correct, but as you can imagine, there’s a lot of loose and fast playing with statistics to try and suggest that gun sales had anything to do with homicide rates. Ultimately, this is a story that tries to blame a rise in gun violence on lax gun legislation.

The Real Truth

There’s only one problem with this whole premise. The CDC study covers 2015 and 2016. It’s not breaking news. It’s a study on older data, and when you have the context of time, you realize that CBS’s attempts to stick this to gun laws are a mixture of stupid and audacious. If you look back and remember, those years were at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement. Also, Obama was president. In fact, the CDC study shows that Obama’s presidency oversaw the reversal of a 12-year trend in falling homicide and gun crime rates.

This is best seen by looking at Baltimore. The city had seen crime reduce since the 90s. Then, the BLM movement hit its peak. Protests and riots erupted across the city. It was so extreme that police were afraid to even show up in certain neighborhoods. As a result, homicide skyrocketed.

Baltimore alone represented a significant chunk of the 2015 data in the CDC report. Realizing their mistake, the rioters in Baltimore begged the police to come back to their neighborhoods. Since then, crime has fallen back to normal margins.

That’s a specific example, but data since 2016 shows that the shift in the national narrative has correlated with a massive drop in homicide and gun crime. In 2017, a three-year trend reversed and those rates fell for the first time. So far, 2018 is looking to have such a major drop in homicide that even the New York Times is reporting on it. Early data points to a seven-percent drop — the largest seen in over a decade.

Better Correlations

In the United States, it makes no sense to try and correlate gun ownership with short-term homicide rates. The homicide rates have gone up and down many times. Meanwhile, gun ownership has only risen. Every year brings a new all-time high. Despite that, gun crime and murder are at near historic lows (since WWII).

With the context you now have, the reasonable correlation is obvious. Presidential rhetoric can matter. Obama was anti-police, and Trump supports the boys in blue. The difference is clear in the numbers. Obama’s stances oversaw a rapid rise in murder and homicide. Trump has seen the opposite.

CBS set out to attack gun laws and suggest that murder and homicide rates are the fault of the GOP, the NRA and Trump. Instead, they accomplished the opposite. The CDC basically proved that Trump is a better president than Obama and that we don’t need to change a single gun law to make America a safer place.