What Does ‘Hidden’ Data Have To Do With Pushing Gun Control?

There’s a saying in business that what gets tracked (or measured) gets improved. It’s a way of saying that you have to know what actions are actually being taken (as opposed to what people say that they’re doing) and the results that you’re actually getting to be able to know what works and what doesn’t work.

Which may explain why certain data is being “hidden” by some cities. After all, if you don’t want people to know what you’re doing (or not doing), then, it’s much easier to blame your terrible results on something other than the real cause.

A perfect example of this is gun control. Salam Fatohi writes,

Tracking crime statistics – and more importantly, whether or not crime is rising or falling in the United States – is getting harder to do. That’s because nearly a third of America’s cities are no longer reporting crime statistics to the FBI.

This is more than just a problem for policymakers looking for data to address the cities most in need of assistance. It also means that some policymakers are demanding bad policy because they’re relying on incomplete data.

The Marshall Project reported that 31 percent of the 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. failed to report crime data to the FBI’s national database after transitioning to a new data collection system, according to the latest statistics from the FBI. That’s a slight improvement from 2021, when 40 percent of law enforcement agencies didn’t report crime data. Still, it’s a glaring blind spot, especially when that data is missing from some of the largest metro areas dealing with rampant, out-of-control crime.

Many of those cities also happen to be led by the loudest voices calling for gun control, defunding police and soft-on-crime policies. The trifecta means that gun control politicians are missing a third of the crime picture yet demanding 100 percent of the gun control. Typical behavior for zealots who favor government control over individual freedom.

Fatohi is spot on about this. And while I can’t say definitively if cities run by anti-2A activists are intentionally hiding their terrible results, the reality is that it doesn’t matter if it’s intentional or just slack on their part. Those activists are still calling for gun control to “decrease gun violence” without allowing anyone else, anyone objective, to evaluate the data.

Seems a tad suspicious, don’t you think? It seems like they’re trying to gaslight the American people into thinking that guns are the problem by withholding data that gives context to the gun violence discussion.

And that context always (and only always) shows that guns aren’t the problem. What drives gun violence are the same factors that drive increases in violence overall, and no factors driving increases in violence have to do increased availability of firearms to law abiding citizens.

No, it’s quite the opposite. Increased availability of firearms to law-abiding Americans, in reality, makes the world safer.