FoxNews.com Strikes Again

Quotes anti-gun police chiefs group in crime story

FoxNews.com reporter Audrey Conklin was not very careful, stating on August 2 that Birmingham, Alabama, is “five miles north” of New Orleans. Thereafter, she was also not very polite. After I emailed her to let her know that Birmingham is instead “300 miles or so northeast” of New Orleans—Mississippi being between Louisiana and Alabama, . . .

. . . she changed her article to say that Birmingham is “five hours north” of New Orleans (still getting the compass direction wrong), but didn’t bother to tell me “thanks.”

Conklin also didn’t include a statement at the end of her revised article, noting that she had (at least partially) corrected her geographic mistake. I don’t expect better from FoxNews.com. Not after this headline:

Aside from the plural-singular confusion of “women . . . her,” the headline indicates that, allegedly, a carjacker dragged a woman (or women) with a baseball bat. The confusion was compounded by Fox’ revised headline, which indicated, again allegedly, that the perpetrator of the crime against the woman was not the carjacker after all, but was instead the other fellow who chased him down.

Of course, the headlines do not reflect the facts of the case.

Conklin was also not very diligent about conducting research for her August 8 article about crime, citing the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), an outfit consisting of police executives from big cities in the U.S. and Canada.

Whatever the MCCA’s interests are otherwise, it’s an anti-gun group. Conklin should have expected as much. In the U.S., most big cities have Democrat mayors and city councils, who often appoint anti-gunners as the chiefs of their police departments. It’s how anti-gunner Art Acevedo went from being chief of police in Austin, Texas (the mayor and most city council members of which are basically Marxists), to police chief in Houston (the mayor of which is an anti-gun Democrat who supports illegal immigration and other elements of the radical Left’s agenda), to chief in Miami (which has a Republican mayor, and from which job Acevedo was fired after six months). In Canadian big cities, the bias against gun ownership is just as bad.

In her August 2 article, Conklin mentioned that most big U.S. cities that have high murder rates are led by Democrat politicians. (So are most cities the police departments of which the MCCA claims to represent.) But she failed to connect the dots. In her August 8 article, she quoted the MCCA saying “Access to firearms and the amount of guns that are on the street . . . can be directly correlated to the amount of homicides we have,” without questioning the group’s assertions or agenda.

If Conklin knew basic stuff about statistics, she would have known to challenge the MCCA’s claim on the grounds that correlation is not the same as causation. For example, during Summer, more people wear short-sleeved shirts, and more people go swimming outdoors. But the correlation between those two facts doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

Conklin could also have questioned the MCCA’s implication that “the amount of guns” caused the recent increase in homicides, on the grounds that, if anything, it’s the other way around—reverse causation—namely that homicides and other dangers led to a surge in firearm acquisitions by the American people over the last 2-3 years.

That is, after roughly 12 million background checks related to firearm purchases in 2018 and another roughly 12 million in 2019 (the exact number of firearms purchased cannot be determined), the numbers were roughly 20 million in 2020, and 17.5 million in 2021. And while the numbers for January-July 2022 are lower than those for the same seven-month periods in 2020 and 2021, they’re still much higher than those for 2018 and 2019.

The increase in purchase-related checks was fueled by President Trump’s March 2020 declaration of a national emergency related to the virus from communist China; the riots by Marxist Black Lives Matter and anarcho-communist Antifa terrorists and insurrectionists during Summer 2020; the increase in murders and other violent crimes in Democrat cities after Democrat mayors and city councils defunded police departments and Democrat district attorneys began refusing to prosecute persons arrested for violent crimes; the inauguration, under highly questionable circumstances, of gun confiscation advocate Joe Biden as president in January 2021; and Biden’s opening of the border to illegal aliens, resulting in an influx of criminals we didn’t have here previously. While all of those factors contributed to the increase in firearm acquisitions, it’s the Democrats’ pro-criminal policies that “can be directly correlated to the amount of homicides we have.”

Conklin could also have challenged the MCCA’s guns-equals-crime claim on the grounds that as the number of privately owned firearms increased steadily, the nation’s murder rate dropped 57 percent, from an all-time high of 10.2 per 100,000 population in 1980, to an all-time low of 4.4 in 2014. That includes an astronomical increase in the number of AR-15s, comparable rifles, and rifle and handgun ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds, the new limit Democrats are proposing in H.R. 1808.

With some research, Conklin would also have known that “guns . . . on the street” is a soundbite anti-gun activist groups have been using for decades. In just one among countless examples, in the 1979-1980 timeframe, long before 20-something Conklin was born, Handgun Control, Inc., then posing as only a handgun prohibition agitation group, said “HANDGUNS flood the houses and streets of our nation.” (Emphasis in the original.) The soundbite has always been meant to convey the idea that guns are out there, running around causing mayhem all on their own, beyond the control of their possessors. Consistent with Democrat ideology, the soundbite attempts to cast blame away from criminals and the Democrat policies that foster them, and shift it to guns.

Conklin should have also understood that anti-gun activists intend the soundbite to disparage the idea of guns being in the hands of decent people for protection, on the street or anywhere else. Professor John Lott, of the Crime Research Prevention Center, an excellent source of information Conklin didn’t quote, reports that, as of 2021, about 21.5 million Americans had handgun carrying permits/licenses—all issued to people who passed background checks. That’s a much greater number than that of criminals, on the street or anywhere else.

Conklin should have also recognized the MCCA’s anti-gun agenda from another obvious clue that she apparently missed. In a July 20 letter to Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York (whose name the MCCA misspelled “Nalder”), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, from which the Democrats’ latest gun- and magazine-ban legislation came, the MCCA endorsed the ban, saying “assault weapons and firearms with high capacity magazines . . . have no reasonable sporting or hunting purpose.”

Like the MCCA’s “streets” soundbite, its “sporting” verbiage (also used by the National Shooting Sports Foundation), is straight from anti-gun activist groups. Circa 1981, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns said “rifles and shotguns serve a sporting purpose. . . . It is the concealable handgun that threatens and intimidates the citizens of this country—not the rifle and not the shotgun.” And in 1993, Handgun Control, Inc. (noted above), having finally come out against rifles as well as handguns, said “the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” (Emphases added.)

Of course, the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms primarily for defensive purposes. The Framers of the Bill of Rights made that clear, the Supreme Court has recognized it four times (U.S. v. Miller, 1939, District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008, McDonald v. Chicago, 2010, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, 2022), and Judge Roger Benitez said so expressly related to “assault weapons” in his decision in Miller v. Bonta (2021). And to the frustration of the MCCA, other anti-gun activist groups, and their Democrat water-carriers (and the significance of which is missed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation), surveys have consistently shown that protection is the reason most commonly cited by Americans for having guns.

© Mark Overstreet 2022