The journalists in the mainstream media really want you to hate the pro-gun laws being adopted by states like Iowa and Texas, so much so that they’re willing to tell you that a law that hasn’t even taken effect yet is causing massive problems with gun violence.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press released an article titled “Gun deaths rising in Iowa as new law removes handgun permits,” with subsequent social media posts that sell the idea in the headline. Other major news outlets from NBC News to The Hill also took the story up and flung the message onto their social media pages as well.

The law, set to go into effect today, will allow people to carry firearms without a permit. AP tells you this, and then proceeds to give you the numbers of just how many Iowans have died thanks to guns:

A record 353 Iowa residents died from gunshot wounds in 2020, including 263 suicides and 85 homicides, an Iowa Department of Public Health spokeswoman said Tuesday. The shooting deaths represent a 23% increase from Iowa’s previous high of 287 in 2019, including an 80% jump in homicides, according to state data.

To things immediately stand out to the discerning reader. Firstly, it’s blaming a gun violence hike taking place over the course of a year on a law that has only taken effect today. This is clear narrative creating. It’s an attempt at making pro-gun legislation seem as if it’s causing disasters to happen even before it gets a chance to become a thing because pro-gun legislation is just that potent.

It’s the same as saying car crashes increased at an intersection ahead of traffic lights being set up there and saying the imminent arrival of the traffic lights caused the accidents. It doesn’t make sense, but it gets worse.

The other thing you’ll notice is the fact that the media attempted to sell this narrative by glossing over a very important piece of information. It doesn’t stop and ponder the 263 suicides or why they happened despite it being more than two-thirds of the gun deaths. The article spends quite a bit of time talking about how foolish the new gun law is and blames it for every problem under the sun, but it only mentions the suicides again one other time, saying that they’d go down if people weren’t able to get guns on the same day they purchase them.

The media doesn’t want to stop and ask why the suicides are happening and never really looks into probable causes. It just says that stripping the ability of Americans to get guns on the same day would reduce them. This is treating the symptom, not the disease.

This lack of research isn’t providing us with any course of action and we’re left to make guesses as to the root issue. Given the fact that we’re coming off the back of COVID lockdowns, it’s likely that many of these suicides, and even much of the crime, was driven by the negative effects caused by isolation, joblessness, desperation, and hopelessness that many felt and scientists even warned us about back in May of 2020.

(READ: Lockdown May Cause “Despair Deaths” From Suicide, Drug, and Alcohol Abuse Says Study)

While Iowa never truly locked down, it still felt the economic effects that saw thousands on thousands of jobs disappear. As these people descend further and further into poverty, all the negative side effects of it rise. It’s an easy equation but not one the media seems to want to acknowledge.

So the media is ignoring very solid potential leads about suicide and crime as related to the lockdowns so that it can push the narrative that gun crime is being caused by a pro-gun law that hadn’t even taken effect until today.

Welcome to journalism in 2021.