Major Magazine Article FAILS Fact Check On This Key Point

Here’s a question for you: who fact checks mainstream media “news” sources and their crony fact checkers? The mainstream media pretends that they are only providing facts to people, but the fact of the matter is that the mainstream media often lies or, at the very least, omits other information to give context for what they’re reporting which would give a different meaning to what they’re telling us.

And, believe me, it happens all of the time. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have done it better himself.

Take, for example (since we’re a site about gun ownership), the way that the mainstream media treats the subject of gun violence. They tell you that gun violence is a huge problem in America, and, to be fair, any decent person wants to see a decrease in gun violence because violence is a horrible thing.

What the mainstream media says is the cause of that violence couldn’t be farther from the truth, though. Jon Miltimore writes,

“[People buying guns in order to protect themselves] creates a vicious cycle: More people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings, which in turn heightens the desire to carry a weapon for protection,” Graham writes. “When crime is decreasing, this dynamic helps it continue to fall, but once it begins to rise, the feedback loop turns ugly.”

Whether this claim is [David A.] Graham’s [of The Atlantic] or [University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard] Rosenfield’s is unclear. No link or citation is offered to support the assertion. What we do know is the claim that “more people carrying guns tends to result in more shootings” is simply untrue.

As economist Mark Perry pointed out several years ago, the US saw gun violence steadily decrease over multiple decades as gun ownership surged.

“According to data retrieved from the Centers for Disease Control, there were 7 firearm-related homicides for every 100,000 Americans in 1993 (see light blue line in chart),” Perry wrote. “By 2013…the gun homicide rate had fallen by nearly 50% to only 3.6 homicides per 100,000 population. ”

This decline, Perry points out, occurred as the number of privately owned firearms in America surged from about 185 million in 1993 to 357 million in 2013.

And in case you’re wondering, non-fatal shootings followed a similar decline as fatal shootings, as Vox reported at the time. This is part of a larger decline in gun violence that saw “a 39 percent decline in gun homicides between 1993 and 2011 and a staggering 69 percent decline in non-fatal firearms crimes.”

So, why would The Atlantic publish an article that outright lies about the relationship between the number of guns which are privately owned and gun violence? My guess is that the truth doesn’t fit their preferred narrative.

What lying like that does do, though, is make more and more people distrust the mainstream media (which they should) because the mainstream media is simply showing themselves to be the propaganda arm of the anti-gun movement in America.

No wonder the mainstream media hates “alternative” news sources. The mainstream media hates the truth.