With violent crime skyrocketing in American cities, local officials and mediahave blamed the deaths of innocent children and mostly African-American victims on “gun violence,” a term that obfuscates who is responsible for these tragic crimes.
The term “gun violence” has long been used by gun control groups, politicians, and the media to refer to the criminal misuse of firearms, in an attempt to pin the violence on guns themselves, not criminals, despite the fact that a gun is an inanimate object incapable of violence on its own.
After New York City saw more than 300 people, all minorities, shot since the start of June, the New York Police Department’s Chief of the Community Affairs Bureau Jeffrey Maddrey said “gun violence” was the common enemy of communities and cops.
After a six-year-old African-American boy was shot and killed in San Fransisco while watching fireworks on July Fourth, local media said the mayor decried “gun violence.”
A CNN headline read, “At least 6 children were killed by gun violence across the nation this holiday weekend.”
In a PBS NewsHour report titled, “What’s behind a recent surge in U.S. gun violence — and how to stop it,” one panelist concluded the problem is “the underlying police violence,” saying he believes “there is actually a connection between police violence and community violence.”
Since June 20, nine children under the age of 18 have been shot dead in Chicago, a city that touts some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Similar stories have emerged out of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., where the official response is not to address grieving parents asking why black lives don’t matter regarding black-on-black crime, but to instead call for more restrictions on guns.
The Washington Post responded to the recent crimes in their city by publishing an op-ed calling black-on-black crime a “fallacy,” and concluding by blaming “lawmakers’ blind devotion to the NRA.” Nevermind the fact that more homicides are committed every year with knives and blunt objects than are committed with firearms.
Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said there have never been more firearms lawfully owned by Americans, and until very recently, we have seen crime rates plummet. “In reality, when law-abiding citizens own firearms, crime goes down, not up,” he told The Federalist. “What we have here are criminals engaging in criminal activity, illegally possessing firearms, and misusing them to commit their crimes.”
Of course the recent spike in crime is related to a number of complicated and intertwined factors like coronavirus, an economic collapse, the defunding of local police departments, and mayors allowing chaos and anarchy in cities like Seattle. But that has not stopped the gun control lobby’s friends in the media and the Democrat Party from blaming “gun violence” for all of the above.
As for the gun industry and the Second Amendment, all of the above has never made them safer.
