On Monday, Cam took down a piece from the New York Times that basically makes the “more guns means more crime” argument. It’s an argument we’ve heard time and time again.

The truth is that the New York Times is pushing the typical anti-gun narrative, and a lot of people are unamused.

As noted, Cam took issue with the claim. So did Jacob Sullum over at Reason. They weren’t alone.

But over at the Columbus Dispatch, they think the Times nailed it.

The premise of a recent New York Times article is sadly spot on — if not at all surprising.

More guns and deconstructed gun laws have made Columbus — and other cities in Ohio and around the nation — far more deadly in the years since the pandemic.

This fact was clear even before a spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg clapped back at House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan last year. The Ohio congressman rallied against violence in New York in hearings about Bragg’s so-called “pro-crime, anti-victim policies.”

“In D.A. Bragg’s first year in office, New York City had one of the lowest murder rates of major cities in the United States (5.2) nearly three times lower than Columbus, Ohio (15.4),” the aide wrote in a message posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If Chairman Jordan truly cared about public safety, he could take a short drive to Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron, or Toledo in his home state, instead of using taxpayer dollars to travel hundreds of miles out of his way,” 

Jordan, an Urbana Republican who represents Ohio’s 4th District, including portions of Columbus, Dublin, and Westerville, hasn’t heeded that advice to focus on violence in Ohio.

In fact, he and his counterparts in the Ohio Legislature have worked diligently to make gun violence worse.

There’s just one problem with this. There’s not a shred of evidence supporting the claim.

As with the Times, the op-ed writer at the Dispatch simply points to crime statistics from several years ago and opinion polls to make their entire argument, yet the truth is that while there are even more guns today in Ohio than there were in 2020, homicides have dropped more than 50 percent this year over this time the previous year.

Let’s also note that while Columbus has a massive drop in homicides so far in 2024, here are some cities that aren’t seeing a drop:

• Long Beach, CA (+80%)
• Los Angeles, CA (+6.6%)
• Fresno, CA (+133.3%)
• Colorado Springs, CO (+180%)
• Gresham, OR (50%)
• Riverside, CA (50%)
• Rochester, NY (17.6%)

And that’s not an exhaustive list of increases in cities located in anti-gun states. It’s also largely irrelevant. There’s a lot of context I’m not including, for example, such as how some of these were just ridiculously low last year, meaning it doesn’t take much to create a spike. 

But what it does do is show that if we decide to look at everything in isolation, we can make all the correlations in the world we care to make.

If the Dispatch and their op-ed writers want to make the case that the Times got it right, they need to step up and actually show some evidence beyond crime statistics from three years ago when pretty much every major city saw a massive increase in homicides regardless of their gun laws.

As it currently stands, more guns have come into circulation since that spike in 2020 and crime has trended downward since then. If we use the “methodology” of the New York Times, then more guns mean less crime.

Somehow, the Dispatch also missed that fact.