Correlation does not equal causation. Unless you’re ABC News. In that case, sure it does! Because God knows there are plenty of people ready, willing and able to tell the camera that “lax gun laws” enable, indeed create “gun violence.” What ARE these lax gun laws that supposedly led to an increase in firearms-related homicides in Missouri, exactly? The report doesn’t say. Pay no attention to the facts behind that curtain! As for ABC’s love affair with California’s Operation Ceasefire . . .

There is no credible data to show this enormously expensive taxpayer-funded program — which hires ex-cons to “interrupt” gang violence (not shown) — has any effect on firearms-related crime. Remembering, again, that correlation does not equal causation.

As for the pro-gun rights position, it doesn’t even get a look in. Why would it? That would be something approaching actual journalism, which this sure as hell ain’t. In case you didn’t know.

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53 COMMENTS

  2. And they act all offended when we call them the state run media. They are an enemy and should be regarded with hostility. That’s not hyperbole.

    Although, many Soviet prime ministers are looking at the US media with awe, so they got that going for them, which is nice.

  3. Kansas City is a deep-blue progressive cesspool. The “gun violence” there originates from the same sources as it does everywhere else: gangs and drugs. The gang bangers there aren’t availing themselves of “relaxed” laws that they never followed to begin with.

    • Our Mayors name is “Sly”…

      He is rabidly anti-gun. He saw that our constitution was being amended to provide for open carry in cities that had outlawed the practice, protect ammo, accessories etc., raising to strict scrutiny and unalienable and the sly politician he is, decided to quickly press our city council to outlaw open carry. He did so that when the law passed, he could claim that he was so important and his cause so glorious that the State was attacking him and changing his laws. Obviously he has plans for a bigger political career. Until that time, KC had always been open carry just as the state is open carry. Now you’ve got a have a concealed carry permit to open carry in KC.

        • I should look into it a little more closely but what I understand was that the preemption applies after the law was passed and cities that already had a ban in place then lifted the ban for those that possessed a CC so that they can argue that they aren’t technically outlawing or preventing open carry in court. Otherwise they would have not been able to regulate it at all. This was part of the reason a number of city’s rushed to ban open carry ahead of the law. And of course in KC it takes up to 8 months or longer to even get an appointment date with the Sherrif to apply for the permit and then weeks to months for them to approve or deny it. Just bury and burden it and drag feet…

          In our case Sly outlawed it two weeks before out amended constitution came to pass.

          Somebody correct me if I’m mistaken…

        • Missouri also passed an amendment that defined the right to arms as unalienable. Which, in theory at least, makes the new carry statutes moot.

          The thing is, there’s going to be legal challenge. I know I don’t plan on being the one who gets to be the establishing case law.

  4. The reason that the Demons believe that they have a winning issue in gun control is the left’s near-total domination of media — print, electronic and film. By steadily dumping anti-gun propaganda into their dear little ears, the Demons believe that they will be able to persuade lemming voters to press the levers that will deliver all power to the left.

    No surprises here. Control of the media is control of the narrative. King Hussein is a master of media control. Republicans stupidly believe that they can win a fair fight. Well, there won’t be a fair fight. This election will be the dirtiest in human history.

    Which is why, among Republicans, only Trump can win. He knows how to twist media, and he doesn’t fight fair. Good for him. If he’s a b@stard it’s okay since he’s our b@stard. I’m good with that.

    Don’t like him or don’t trust him? Fine. Because you will either end up with Trump, who may not do the right thing some of the time, or Hillary, who will do the wrong thing all of the time.

    • “Which is why, among Republicans, only Trump can win.”

      That’s like saying among pro-gun laws only fix nics can win…

      I’ll pass on the false dichotomy… what is with this desperation of the Trump people?

      • “… what is with this desperation of the Trump people?”

        The stakes of the ‘Game’.

        Our country’s very future.

        And that isn’t hyperbole…

      • what is with this desperation of the Trump people?

        Actually, I’m a Cruz guy — but I don’t have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.

    • Ralph, I agree with you. I’m not a huge fan of Trump, but I’m old enough to remember the establishment GOP types as well as the media trashing Ronald Reagan in exactly the same way in 1979-80. He too, had been an actor, a democrat, a union member and somewhat of a liberal. He realized the error of his ways, and went on to tweak the noses of the left and the the old blue blood east coast GOP families. I’d like to see Cruz get the nomination, but I won’t sit home if Trump ends up with it. The GOP has had 8 yrs to explain to the American public why Liberalism is wrong, and they’ve done nothing. They continue to believe that they will get the msm to like them. I’ve had enough. We have given them all the power needed to stop Obama’s agenda, or at least to slow it down, and they’ve failed miserably. It’s time to clean house.

      • I’m (perhaps) a little older, and remember very clearly the day that doddering old fool was elected. 7 years of straight tax increases, hiring 320,000 government employees, tripling the deficit, and also a bit under tripling the national debt. At the end of his tenure, there were over 5MM fedzilla employees (not all his fault). By the end of 2000 Clinton we had about 4.2MM.

        Reagan earned his gun bonafides in CA as governor. By that, I mean he was horribly anit-gun. By the time he got to be President, he ended up signing away our rights to buy new auto guns.

        Ronnie was a good speaker, you have to be to shovel all that bullshit under the rug. Probably one of the worst Presidents of the last 100 years. Right up there with Obama.

        • During Reagan’s two terms, taxes on the top 10% of wage earners increased, while taxes on the lower 50% decreased. I am very well aware of this since, as a Wall Street lawyer, I was in the upper half (higher, really) and I didn’t care. Real median family income grew by $4,000 during the Reagan period. There was zero growth under Carter. According to the CATO Institute, 8 of 10 economic indicators improved under Reagan; and the economy performed better during his two the terms than before or after.

          Under Reagan, no pissant countries like North Korea or Iran pissed on us like they did under Carter, and the Soviet Union collapsed under his successor, mostly because of what Reagan did.

          I could go on, and on, and on, but there’s no point. You hated the guy and nothing will dissuade you. That’s fine.

          Reagan wasn’t perfect — far from it. But I’ve been around since Truman, and Reagan was our best President during that period any nobody but Ike was close,

        • Not sure what you’re remembering Ralph, but it wasn’t life under Reagan for most Americans. For a Wall Street lawyer, it was the beginning of the great wealth redistribution. For the middle-class, it was the beginning of the end. Perspective and all that.

          Real wages for most Americans stayed flat through the ’80s. The inflation of the Nixon/Ford/Carter years was finally brought under control, but the average American made no more money. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the wealthiest one-fifth of American households (those who naturally owned the most stock) saw their incomes increase by 14%. Meanwhile, the poorest one-fifth (who presumably owned no stock) endured an income decline of 24%, while the incomes of the middle three-fifths of American families stayed more or less flat.

          Reagan’s tax policies did, however, redistribute the tax burden significantly. By cutting income taxes, which are paid at a higher rate by those at the top, while increasing payroll taxes, which are paid at a higher rate by the working poor and middle class, Reagan shifted the tax burden. During the 1980s, the total effective federal taxation rate for the poorest one-fifth of American families actually increased by more than 16%. By comparison, the effective taxation rate for the wealthiest one-fifth of families fell by 5.5%, and the richest one percent of Americans saved even more: their tax rate fell by 14.4%

          You and I may not live long enough to have to pay for the obscenity of doubling the National Debt by every President (save Clinton) since, but I guarantee our children will. And it’ll make the Depression look like a party.

          As far as his foreign policy and pissants, there was the Beirut embassy bombing (17 killed), the Marine barracks bombing (241 killed), Kuwait bombings (8 killed), 1984 Another CIA station chief was kidnapped with a total over over 30 people taken, Iran Contra and all those missiles to the enemy, TWA 847, Rome and Vienna Airport bombings, La Belle Disco. Pan Am 103 (Lockerbie).

          The great communicator cut and run from all of those pissants. The only one he “stood up to” was an ailing Soviet Union, already in serious turmoil by the time he took office. Just waiting for the final blow of a sustained crash in the price of oil to “tear down that wall”.

          I get it, you like the guy, and he was definitely good for the 1% ever since. But for the country as a whole, not so much.

  5. So let me get this straight. A criminal does a drive by shooting on a house, a three year old dies, and the problem is the gun???

    There is no proof – or even evidence, that the gun laws in missouri “caused” those criminals to kill people.

    Criminals in Kansas City shooting at criminals. Hold on a second while I shed an Obama tear.

    Do you live in Missouri? Do you want to reduce homicides (with a gun)? Don’t join a gang, take drugs, and shoot at people. Problem solved.

  7. Why wouldn’t relaxed gun laws result in more gun deaths? The whole idea is that law-abiding citizens can arm themselves and defend their lives and property, and that of others, within reason. It would certainly make sense in that case that until the bad guys figured out that they were in serious danger of getting seriously shot that the number of gun deaths would increase until the lesson was learned and transmitted through their community.

    So the important information is not gross number of “gun deaths” (actually, death by gunfire), but who, exactly, is getting dead, and why.

    • +1 I’ve asked myself the same question. What if the homicide rate increases after relaxed gun laws because more violent criminals are dying?

    • It’s almost exclusively gang related. Every last bit of it. We have a a large contingent or gang fighting that goes on in our East side.

      • The obvious solution is to require every person apprehended with a tattoo identifying gang affiliation to undergo 8 hrs of state sponsored handgun safety training including 4 hours of tactical pistol with 100 rounds of live fire. Might save a few innocent bystanders if these morons could actually hit their intended target more reliably than a cop.

        Shouldn’t be necessary, but /sarc.

  8. Our homicide rate in KC always ebbs and flows. Our criminals aren’t buying guns at Cabela’s or Bass Pro. Some may be purchasing them at the Smart Pawn on Troost and 63rd but the majority are buying them off the street or stealing them. They aren’t passing background checks, they aren’t even submitting to them.

    Until a few years back you had to be licensed to purchase a handgun in Missouri. That’s the “relaxed gun laws” they are worried about. This story has been gaining momentum the last few months. Sucks because we have a campus carry bill, a public transportation carry bill and a constitutional carry bill in the legislature right now. We’ve been on a good roll the last few years and I want these to pass too.

    • Our criminals aren’t buying guns at Cabela’s or Bass Pro.

      That’s because Cabela’s and Bass Pro are overpriced, while criminals are value shoppers.

  9. It ain’t just ABC-all the lame-stream networks suck. Even Fox has more than their fair-share of losers. Speaking of media-what the heck is going on again-off again with Hickok 45? Any insights TTAG’ers? Last I looked it only had old videos up…stay tuned.

  10. Just following their messiah’s lead: “Hey, guys, Obama wants to talk up gun control. We need to do more reports on evil guns”. Journalism is deader than chivalry.

  11. Heard of but didn’t see any actual data for Missouri.

    I know a while back Johns Hopkins had some bloomberg funded study that allegedly linked CT gun control laws with reduced crime, but i was able to debunk it in about 5 minutes.

    surprise surprise: in the CT case they cherry picked their analysis periods. big time.

  12. I find it ironic that the ABC anti-civil rights propaganda piece featured a cast solely comprised of African Americans. Could it be that they are worried about the increase in support for gun rights among people of color?

  13. I live in MO, in the “county” of St. Louis, 20 miles west of the city proper. Basically if you cut out St. Louis City and Kansas City I bet MO would have one of the lowest gun deaths rates in the US.

    Mo has a Black on Black gun death problem. That is not a racist statement, just a honest and truthful statement. Something ABC, CNN, NBC, MSNBC (etc) or the White House would NEVER say.

    • STL is an incredibly safe city as long as you’re not a black, low-level drug dealer, or happen to live in North St. Louis. That’s it.

      The day-in, day-out crime/murder is overwhelmingly that tiny subset.

    • Mo has a Black on Black gun death problem.
      Face facts, the whole dang country has a bad Black drug gun problem. Yeah other areas and demographics have problems, but not like inner city black gang culture.

  14. I did the research on this the second i heard this non-sense appear on the scene. Rather than relying on the study’s headline, i actually looked at it myself, and of course found that it was bullshit.

    Background:
    Missouri previously had a NJ style requirement that you go in person to a police officer to get a permit to purchase a handgun. All this was, was that the police officer gives you a background check through NICS and charges you money for it. You then got your purchase permit and went and bought your handgun and got the same NICS check again. Missouri’s legislature, being sane and rational, saw that requiring the same background check twice was simply stupid and waste of their polices’ time. So they repealed it.

    How they lied this time:
    The repeal came at the same time as Missouri was experiencing a very mild upswing in crime, while the whole nation experienced a flattening of the downward slope it was already on. This upswing materialized around 2006 and then plummeted after 2011 to lower than what it was while the permit system was in place. So crime actually decreased after the repeal of the law. So how did they get this claim that it was higher? Well by creating numbers out irrelevant data of course. Good ol’ garbage in, garbage out ya know? They essentially claimed that the crime rate would have been lower if they hadn’t repealed the law. So crime actually decreased, which they admitted, but not as much as they wanted it to. So it’s higher in a sense that it’s higher than it would’ve been in the magical mathematical gun control fantasy land they created in their heads.

    tl;dr
    Crime, including gun crime, is lower now than it was under the permit system. They isolated a specific time frame on a line graph to illustrate their point, while ignoring the slope of the line in general. They bullshitted the whole thing and the media was happy to run with it.

  15. Power tools and work boots are readily available too but it does not seem to many of the gangstas break out in random acts of gainful employment.

    • Ha!

      It’s a shame this gem is buried down here at the bottom of the thread. Made me laugh — nothing’s more fun that seeing bad arguments destroyed with logic and humor at the same time.

      • If it is sound logic to say that the presents of an object is a causation of an action. Then it would be sound logic to reason that the action taking place is appropriated to the implement. In this case our section 8 dwelling colleagues declare guns create violence. By that same logic it should be true that work boots, tools, and fleet of work trucks would turn you street gang in to a construction company. The reality is though, the trucks would be stripped and the tools would be pawned and possibly used as weapons.

        Before violence can be reduced the cause will have to identified. Nobody wants to have that conversation. The truth is ugly and unbiased. We don’t do ugly and unbiased in the land of free speech. It is just not polite. To further prove this point let’s look at England. I get so sick of hearing about how much safer and better England is. No you won’t get shot there. Same as you will not get attacked by a shark in Wyoming. It is not because England is better at controlling violence. It is not because Wyoming has a better shark repellant system. It is because guns are not prevalent in England and there is no sharks in Wyoming. In fact in England you are more likely to be attacked and beaten or stabbed to death.

        Poverty is the mother of desperation. Desperation is the mother of desperate measures. I don’t claim to have the answers for all of these problems. I just know that taking my rights away is not the right thing to do because a hand full of fools act like savages.

        • Poverty is the mother of desperation. We do have areas of poverty where the violent crime rate is low.

        • I get so sick of hearing about how much safer and better England is. With all the Muzzie immigrants, that is not the case.

  16. I believe these studies come from public health authorities like Johns Hopkins, who are not qualified to comment on the issue. For decades, the public health and medical communities have tried to act as if they are somehow authorities on the subject of gun violence, when really it is a criminology issue. They are no more qualified to talk about it then criminologists are to talk about public health. The medical community has a well-documented history of being notoriously anti-gun however and they want gun violence to be regarded as a public health issue for two reasons:

    1) Can allow for guns to be regulated via new avenues

    2) Allows them to have a voice in the debate and to speak as experts on the subject, even though they are not

    I saw this on the CNN panel after the Obama town hall, where Van Jones was citing “Johns Hopkins studies” on the issue and the one woman was saying about how there is nothing “in the public health literature” (that was favorable to gun rights) about some issue on guns they were discussing.

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