It’s the first week of the year, so Second Amendment news can be a tad scarce. We’ve talked about California and the end of their open carry ban, but there’s got to be more going on than just that, right?
So, we scour the internet looking for stuff to talk about, and that led me to the ridiculously named Good Men Project, which isn’t about creating good men, just men who adhere to the leftist orthodoxy, as if that’s what being a good man is really about.
They’ve never come across an anti-gun piece they wouldn’t run, and this time they ran one from a group called The 19th*.
It’s one of those “non-partisan newsrooms” that exists just to push the Democrats’ agenda under the guise of non-partisanship. This time, they’re talking about domestic violence murder-suicides, which is something that will be a problem until the number of them annually is zero. There’s no room for debate on that one.
The problem, however, is that the story itself isn’t really about that. It’s an anti-gun hitpiece, complete with an appearance from Everytown for Gun Safety.
Roughly 19 women are killed with a firearm in domestic violence homicide-suicides each month, according to a new report released Thursday from Everytown for Gun Safety shared exclusively with The 19th.
“When we look at the public discourse on gun violence or on gun violence prevention, it tends to surround very public mass shootings,” said Sonali Rajan, senior director of research at the gun violence prevention nonprofit that advocates for gun control. The type of violence covered in the new report is a “conflation of two public health and public safety crises” — intimate partner violence and suicide.
Can we stop pretending that “studies” and “reports” from Everytown are anything other than anti-gun advocacy dressed up like unbiased research? They’ve literally never released a study that didn’t produce some justification for one gun control law or another.
I’ve looked at that report–a report conveniently only handed to a “newsroom” that uses an asterisk in their name because they say the 19th Amendment was only for white women, which tells you plenty about their priorities–and in this case, they push for things like red flag laws and active efforts to disarm domestic offenders.
However, there’s nothing in the study other than anecdotes about where these killers got their guns in the first place. There’s nothing at all about that, which seems kind of important, because while one person seems to claim that the killer crossed state lines and committed a face-to-face transfer, it should be remembered that it’s illegal for him to have done so. In other words, they’re acknowledging that the law didn’t work to stop it, and their answer is more laws.
Moving on…
“Firearms make it five times more likely that an abuser will kill their female partner,” Rajan said. Access to a gun also increases the likelihood of death by suicide because of impulsivity and the lethality of firearms.
Nearly 5,500 women were killed by an intimate partner across seven years of data, according to Everytown. In a third of those instances, the abuser then killed themselves and 85 percent of those dual tragedies involved a firearm. The figure is likely underrepresented due to uneven state-by-state data collection. It also doesn’t include women who were injured by their partner’s firearm, or threatened with one.
Crucially, this type of lethal violence is preventable. Policy analysis showed that states with strong gun control laws had three times fewer incidents of domestic violence homicide-suicide versus states with the weakest legal codes.
“The lethality and accessibility of firearms give abusers in suicidal crisis the ability to overpower and harm multiple people with little chance for intervention or survival,” according to the report.
Yeah, we’ve looked at the “policy analysis” not that long ago ourselves. It was based on surveys in two states alone, then counted gun thefts as “firearm purchases” for their purposes, which is incredibly problematic for what should be obvious reasons.
I’m not defending domestic violence. I’m not excusing the murder of women who did nothing wrong beyond having bad taste in men. However, let’s also note that this is around 260 women per year on average in a country of 330 million people. (One-third of all women killed in intimate partner violence averaged over seven years.) This isn’t an epidemic, and while the only acceptable number is zero, this also doesn’t mean that we should upend the entire right to keep and bear arms over an issue that damn near amounts to statistical noise.
It should also be noted that while they say 85 percent of these awful murder-suicides were carried out with a firearm, that’s not all that much higher than the nearly 80 percent of all homicides carried out with a gun.
In other words, this looks even less like a gun issue and more like a society issue.
Domestic violence doesn’t become better because the percentages of murder-suicides in intimate partner cases flip the percentages, so 85 percent involve a bat or a hammer. No one feels better that a loved one was killed with something other than a gun.
But neither The 19th* or Everytown cares about that. It’s about pushing a narrative and pretending that they’re just pushing the facts.
Statistically, Everytown should have released at least some study that, at worst, didn’t show anything about gun control working one way or another. The fact that they’ve never had a single one tells you that either they’re going into these “studies” with a preconceived result in mind or they just spike anything that doesn’t advance the narrative.
And so-called newsrooms like The 19th* and The Trace just push it out like they’re doing real journalism instead of advocacy.
We’re not buying it.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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