[This article originally appeared at Handwaving Freakoutery and is reprinted here with permission. To subscribe to HWFO, click here.]
By BJ Campbell, Handwaving Freakoutery
Today we are going to pick apart this tweet:
…and its companion article to explain in clear terms the many layers of lies that the media and the antigun activists are telling, some unwittingly and some intentionally, so we can see how those layers interact.
Let’s begin . . .
America reached the grim number by the first week of March – record time, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.
Let’s look at the most recent mass shooting according to CNN’s graphic.
Three adults and one child caught bullets in a Memphis ghetto during a drive-by or similar, and all were in stable condition at various hospitals. Nothing like the horrific spree shootings. Certainly terrible for all involved, but it’s the sort of thing that plays out on local news every day that everyone in the country regularly ignores.
The Gun Violence Archive sets the bar in such a way that it will go up and down with the rates of generic violence, because it’s literally just measuring generic violence.
The first layer of the lie is they bait and switch you with the definitions.
This is the fastest we’ve reached this grim milestone since @GunDeaths started tracking the data in 2014.
The year of our lord two thousand fourteen. What a convenient time to start the clock. Despite what the media tried to make you believe in the twenty teens, 2014 had the lowest murder rate since 1963. It was a historic minima.
There have only been six years in the past century where the USA had a lower murder rate than 2014. The last time we had a rate as low as 2014 was the same year NASA was doing Project Mercury.
Let’s see how the first two lies fit together. First, they index something that has nothing to do with spree killings and instead is a measuring stick for ordinary violent crime. Next, they don’t bother to start their accounting for that measure during the prohibition era, nor the rise of the cocaine in the 1970s, nor the crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s, but instead they only start the clock when the USA was in a historic murder low, to ensure that their faked up measure is “on the rise.”
