We've all heard the Democrats' fantastical gun-grabbing narrative about "assault rifles," "weapons of war," "high-powered rifles," and other such nonsense. And we've all seen the left exploit every "mass shooting" that comes down the pike — which is always a demand for ever-stricter gun-control legislation.
AKA: Further erosion of Second Amendment Rights.
At the center of the calls for tighter gun laws is the dreaded AR-15 — the so-called "assault rifle," a term concocted by the left. Incidentally, "AR" stands for "ArmaLite rifle" — Armalite being the manufacturer that first developed the rifle for civilian use in the early 1950s. Anyway, nary a "mass shooting" occurs without Democrat lawmakers rushing to microphones to histrionically demand a ban on "assault rifles" and/or "weapons of war."
Just one problem. A new study blows a gaping hole in the gun grabbers' myth.
According to myth-busting data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, while the national gun-control debate focuses heavily on AR-15-style rifles, handguns have been used in most mass public shootings over the past 25 years.
Moreover, according to Dr. John R. Lott Jr., the center’s founder, and author of the report, shootings primarily have taken place in what are supposed to be “gun-free zones,” according to the law enforcement officials, and none of the shootings from 1998 to 2023 would have been stopped by requiring universal background checks.
The Democrat Party was unavailable for comment.
Here's more from Dr. Lott:
When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.
These statements give an incorrect impression that there are massacres every day like the infamous 2022 Uvalde shooting, which claimed the lives of nineteen students and two teachers, or the 2023 Lewiston murders, where eighteen people were murdered. A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, shows that much [of] what we believe about these attacks isn’t true.
The numbers cited by Biden and CNN come from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) broadly defines mass shootings to include any case with four or more people shot or injured. Some injuries are not from actually being shot.
“The number of mass public shootings that you see each year is from one to eight," Lott said, adding:
That’s a very different number than what you see that the media covers all the time. The causes and solutions for these mass public shootings are very different.
Is it any surprise that the liberal media ride shotgun (pun intended) for the gun-grabbing Democrat Party?
Gang-Related Shootings
According to Lott, the vast majority of GVA data involves shootings among rival drug gang members.
We hear about all the shootings in Chicago, but the individual attacks almost never get national coverage because they overwhelmingly involve drug gangs. Any type of murder is a tragedy, but the causes and solutions differ for drug gang fights and school shootings.
[...]
Conflating Uvalde with armed robberies or fights over drug turf doesn’t make sense, but it does create inflated numbers that can be used to scare and mislead people. Mass public shootings are very rare, and it’s much rarer still for them to be committed by rifle-toting white supremacists.
And there we have it. Dr. Lott laid it bare for all (who care) to see.
The Democrat Party conflates rare mass shootings like Uvalde with gang-related shootings that occur nearly daily— often with little or no mention by the media. Yet along comes a rare shooting by a "rifle-toting white supremacist," and it's off to the races for the gun-grabbing Democrats.
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