By Mark Walters
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- The headline jumped out at me: America’s Top Cities for Homicides Are on Track for Historic Rates in 2017.
For years I’ve been taking my advice not to be what I call a “headline surfer.” By that, I mean digging into the weeds and reading the article, column, opinion piece masquerading as news, etc. In other words, don’t judge the book by the cover. That’s exactly what the legacy media liars want you to do. Read the headline and skip the story.
Unfortunately, a lot of people do just that, but I’m not one of them, not anymore, anyway!
In this case, it sounded like a headline I would write myself when penning a column about the murder scorecard in Chicago, for example. The headline itself seemed to scream what I’ve been saying for years, that while the FBI reports Uniform Crime Report statistics have been showing a steady decline in overall violent crime for years (with CCW permits and gun ownership at historic highs), certain cities are seeing a massive uptick in murders. Obviously, Chicago immediately comes to mind. So I read the story.
Here are a few lines from the piece:
“Most of this year’s homicides in the top three cities were committed with firearms, according to data obtained from the cities’ police departments. In St. Louis, 96 percent of the 94 homicides recorded in the first half of the year were committed with guns. The same was true in 88 percent of Baltimore’s 170 homicides, and 81 percent of Detroit’s 136 homicides. The composition of gun homicides was essentially unchanged from the same period last year.”
Interestingly the article left out Chicago numbers which kind of made me scratch my head but I continued reading:
“Crime patterns dim the hopes for a reprieve. Monthly gun homicide numbers usually increase in the second half of the year, police data show. Crime in the United States, including murder, has fallen dramatically nationwide since the 1990s. But in individual cities, and especially individual neighborhoods, the picture looks different.
According to an April 2017 report by The Brennan Center, the left-leaning think tank, the 2016 murder rate for the 30 largest American cities increased by 14 percent from 2015.
Escalating levels of gun violence in some cities suggest that the national homicide rate — as well as the often overlooked rates for nonfatal shootings — may show a third consecutive bump when the final numbers are in for 2017. A Washington Post analysis of data collected by Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tallies shootings through news articles and police reports, found that, in the first 200 days of the year, gun deaths have surged by 12 percent.”
When I finished the article, I was shocked.
Forget the fact the writer left out the horrendous murder scorecard in “The Windy City of Murder,” more glaring to me was the source of the column: Bloomberg’s fake news outlet, The Trace. Why would that surprise me, you may ask? I cannot for the life of me figure out why the ultimate source of anti-gun, fake news would be stupid enough to point out the fact that while crime is dropping everywhere gun banners are not in control, it is skyrocketing in the very cesspools brimming with Democrat, gun-haters at the helm. Okay, I really can figure it out. Here’s a hint: They’re stupid. It’s pretty much as simple as that. To be more specific, the Trace’s leaders (who are not stupid) are playing to the lowest common denominator of “headline surfer,” swayed only by emotion, undeterred by fact and logic, who are stupid.
Sad, but true.
The headline is written in such a way for good reason. It’s designed to sway that orange, T-shirt, clad, angry mom who thinks she’s a part of a “grassroots” organization because she clicked “like” on a Facebook page. To that individual, the initial knee-jerk reaction to that headline is, “Holy crap we’ve got to do something!” That “something” turns into screaming for more gun control. Ah, by design.
Sadly, (but understandably) these “lowest common denominators” aren’t the sharpest light-bulbs in the knife-drawer. They are too dull and too dim to understand what record numbers of Americans, living in cities and other areas with falling crime rates, have already figured out. That “doing something” means arming themselves, taking personal responsibility for protecting themselves, their families, and therefore their communities, from the very people their stupid and dangerous policies have created.
About Mark Walters
Mark Walters is the host of two nationally syndicated radio broadcasts, Armed American Radio and Armed American Radio’s Daily Defense with Mark Walters. He is the Second Amendment Foundations 2015 Gun Rights Defender of the Year award recipient and co-author of two books, Lessons from Armed America with Kathy Jackson (Whitefeather Press) and Lessons from UnArmed America with Rob Pincus (Whitefeather Press)