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Is ABC News Getting The Picture On Gun Control?

July 29, 2021 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

When ABC News launched their week-long series on “gun violence” here in the United States, a lot of us (read: me) figured it would be nothing more than a commercial for gun control. Honestly, a lot of what you see out of network news seems to be.

However, a couple of times here and there, they seem to be bumping up against reality.

Then they seem to roll right back over. Cognitive dissonance isn’t a whole lot of fun, apparently.

Yet in their latest installment, they actually seem to be getting to the truth about gun control and how to address gun violence.

Members of Advance Peace are sometimes former gang members and are close to the gang community. They get to know young gang members, foster relationships with them and try to give them other ways to get out their anger.
The group focuses on mainly young men who are prone to violence. “Before he commits a gun crime, he’ll call us,” Aaron Foster, who works for Advance Peace, told ABC News. “We try to get out in front of it.”
Foster lost a son and a daughter to gang violence in Fresno in recent years. Now he works in the community to gain the trust of gang members.
“We know them mostly because we saw them grow up as a kid. When he was in junior high school, we knew this kid would be the next round of shooters,” Foster said.
The staff at Advance Peace say they often get calls from young gang members they are mentoring who say they have just shot somebody and need advice on what to do next. The group will counsel them but, in order to keep their trust and credibility, does not turn them into police. Advance Peace lets police do their investigations without being a source of intelligence. Yet, when members believe there is a gang shooting coming they may tell police they should have units in a certain area beforehand to prevent violence.
Balderrama said he supports Advance Peace as one idea that might help reduce the violence in his city.
“When you build relationships you have influence. If you have no relationships you have no influence,” Balderrama said. “Advance Peace gives us the ability to communicate and give people resources.”

Advance Peace critics accuse the program of being nothing more than paying gang members to not be violent, but the group has to cover a lot of their budget through their own fundraising efforts, which means even if that’s what it is, a lot of it isn’t coming from taxpayers.

And, frankly, there’s a lot of wisdom in trying an approach like this. I don’t know that it’ll work, but even stopping one shooting may well have a massive effect later on.

Yet that’s just one potential solution. ABC News also offered up an interesting perspective on “gun violence” and gun control.

“What we’re seeing, yes, is a peak in violent crime,” Paco Balderrama, the city’s new police chief, told ABC News. “And there’s a lot of factors in that.”
Balderrama became the chief of police in Fresno earlier this year after spending much of his career in Oklahoma and in Texas. Since arriving, he has been tasked with figuring out how to reduce the surging violence in his city. The vast majority of the gun violence is related to gangs and the guns are most often illegal.
“I’m talking about people who have been to prison who have no business carrying a gun. Active gang members. People who are intending to hurt somebody in a crime,” Balderrama said.
…
Police point out most of the guns they come in contact with are illegally obtained and harsher gun laws likely would not impact how they are bought and sold on the streets. Paredes argues the crime surge the U.S. is experiencing is a result of not enough police on the streets, lenient prosecutors and courts, and mental health issues.
“As long as they continue to look for solutions by controlling guns through laws only affecting law-abiding citizens, because they are the only ones who obey the laws, we are going to see an increase in the violent crime rate and use of firearms in commission of crimes,” Paredes said.

An interesting take, and not one I expected to see in an ABC News segment, yet here we are.

It also happens to be true. Pretty much all of it. Gang members and other types of criminals are behind much of the violent crime problem and gun control isn’t going to impact them since they don’t buy guns through the legal gun market.

I’m happy to see a news agency present this.

However, I don’t expect it to hold out. Still, it’ll be nice while it lasts.

ABC News Focuses On Panic Over School Shootings, Not Reality

July 27, 2021 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

School shootings are awful events. I speak for pretty much everyone who isn’t insane when I say we don’t want to see another one happen. However, we don’t really get a say on that. Those who would commit such an atrocity get a vote, unfortunately.

When they carry out such an attack, every parent thinks just a bit about how they would deal with it if it was their child’s school. I sure have and I know I’m not alone.

With ABC News looking at “gun violence” in America as part of a series, we had to know they would take a look at this subject. However, instead of reporting reality, they reported on the panic.

A generation of K-12 students have grown up in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting preparing for the possibility of a shooting at their school, even if they don’t know it.
In a kindergarten classroom in New Jersey, 6-year-old Liam and his classmates practiced a drill they have yet to learn the significance of, an active shooter lockdown drill. They were told the intruder was an animal. He recalled to his mom Tara Gimbel, an ABC News producer, “We had to go down and hide under our desks and we pretended there was a bear.”
Hannah Jack, who’s 19, calls this the new normal. “That was life at that point it didn’t even dawn on me that it would be any different.”
Jack was in 5th grade in Watertown, Connecticut, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. “I could see the pain in their face and how scared they were when the alarms went off and it scared me too, you know?”
…
Cox says the ripple effect of gun violence is far-reaching and long-lasting. “The reality of America, is that gun violence, there’s 400 million-plus guns in this country. Gun violence can affect a family or a child’s life at any time, regardless of the community that they’re in,” he said.
Cox points to other countries whose gun-fatalities numbers are far lower than ours. “There is no evidence that Americans are more evil than people in Australia or England or Canada or anywhere else,” he said. “The difference is anybody who wants to get a gun in this country at this moment, it’s not that hard.”

However, Cox and everyone else ABC News spoke with failed to mention one important thing: Schools shootings are still statistically rare.

On the average school day–assuming kids are attending class normally, that is–tens of millions of school kids go to school and come home without incident, not even seeing a gun unless it’s in the holster of a school resource officer.

The odds of anyone being in a mass shooting is 1 in 11,125. The odds for a school shooting, in particular, are even higher.

For some reference, the odds of an unlikely event like choking to death on food is 1 in 3,461.

Yet where was anything alluding to that fact? Instead, they treat the fear of this as completely rational, yet downplay the fear of dying in a car accident as irrational (a 1 in 108 chance).

While it’s fine to want to try and reduce school shootings, let’s not get carried away with the fear. That’s what’s happening in our schools, and yet we get ABC news failing to look at that critically at all.

Par for the course with the media, though.

ABC News Accidentally Gets It Right In Defining “Gun Problem”

July 26, 2021 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

So-called gun violence is an issue. Homicides are skyrocketing and even if other crimes are still trending down, the murder rate is going to be a problem.

That, of course, sparked ABC News to try and get to the heart of the issue.

Now that we’ve started that effort, though, it seems ABC New found the issue.

Of late, police say, the increase in shootings is mainly due to urban gangs, but there are also variants, involving mass shootings, domestic violence and suicide. Much of it, experts say, is exacerbated by the health and economic strains wrought by COVID-19 and powered by the uniquely American affinity for and access to guns.
“You can’t shoot somebody without a gun,” said New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. “Identifying who’s carrying guns, the cops going out there and making the arrests, taking the guns off the street is great. Really what we need is the individual carrying the gun off the street.”
In Shea’s New York City, there was a 100% increase in shootings in 2020 from the year prior. Accidental shootings, domestic violence, suicide, stray bullets and mass casualty all contributed to it, but Shea said the biggest drivers of gun violence are gangs.
“Domestic, road rage, we certainly have seen those incidents. Accidental shootings, playing with a gun, and a friend shoots a friend, we’ve seen all of it with a little more frequency. But if you step back and look at the big picture, that is such a small percentage of what we see regarding gun violence,” Shea told ABC News.
“The vast majority of what we see is still gang-related,” Shea added. “It could be over turf, it could be over drug money. Oftentimes, tragically, it’s over nothing.”

This is important to understand, and yet some folks try to go out of their way to avoid it.

Gang violence accounts for the lion’s share of these homicides. People feel like they’re being disrespected, so they lash out because saving face matters more than anything else. Going to prison isn’t an issue because that will actually improve their standing within the gang.

The thing is, though, most of these gang members have felony convictions. They’re not lawfully allowed to have a firearm. Further, in New York City where Shea is from, they have the toughest gun control laws in the nation. None of that is stopping these homicides from happening.

I mean, we’re talking about a 100 percent increase between 2019 and 2020. That’s not good.

Yet there was no real liberalization of New York City’s gun laws. Nothing happened that made guns more available. Murders still doubled, though.

Through it all, gangs are the drivers of these homicides.

Meanwhile, many believe the answer is to restrict access to firearms for those of us who have done nothing wrong. The killers are getting these guns in the most gun-controlled city in the nation, but restricting our access to guns will somehow make everything all better.

It’s demented.

What’s curious, though, is how ABC News basically glosses over Shea’s revelation. In their effort to define the “gun violence” problem, they actually undermined a lot of the gun control narrative. They just opted to pretend they didn’t.