Mainstream Media Shows Their Left Wing Bias by Promoting Anti-Gun Political Agenda

“Gun Ownership Rates Tied to Domestic Homicides, but Not Other Killings, Study Finds.” The New York Times showed in that headline this past Monday the mainstream media is still carrying the water for progressive’s by pushing their narrative that disarming law-abiding gun owners will cure a host of society’s evils. In this case — spousal abuse of women.

Even though the story was based on a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPH), an organization not above skewering the facts, the liberal media had all it needed to ramp up its assault on the Second Amendment.

Par for course, the usual suspects in the media were quick to repeat the Times’ story over the next 24 hours. The headlines say it all:

“States with More Gun Owners Have More Murders in the Home, Women Most Common Victims” – Newsweek

“Gun Linked to Greater Incidence of Domestic Homicides.” — Science Daily

“Higher gun ownership rates are associated with higher rates of domestic gun homicides — especially for women.” — Bustle Digital Group

“Every 10% increase in gun ownership raises domestic gun homicides by 13%.” — ZME Science

All of these news outlets blindly repeated the New York Times without questioning its source. Had they checked they would have found the APJH has a record of engaging in what David Codrea of Ammoland.com calls “junk science.”

An example of what makes APJH such a poor source for reliable scientific findings is the organization’s “facts” are hidden away behind an APHA membership, a subscriber sign-in, and an access fee.

In previous stories attributed to the APJH, the New York Times has relied on an official press release without having any of the underlying methodology or data to draw on.

All that is needed is to have the reader assume the source must be reliable and then pose questions that lead to the answers the news source desires. As Thomas Pynchon observed, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

Nowhere in the Time’s article is the question asked: “How do you determine ownership?”

Study after study shows that most gun crimes, including domestic violence ones, do not involve a gun that is “owned.” A person who steals a gun possesses that weapon but does not own it. A person who is prohibited from being in possession of a gun (convicted felon, mentally ill) is not a legal owner.

Illegal possession of a gun is not considered in the APJH study and that doesn’t matter to the mainstream media. Such distinctions are not just a matter of semantics but rather cut to the heart of how gun ownership is framed.

As Codrea observes, “The impetus here is to discourage gun ownership among law-abiding Americans since by default the lawbreakers have shown that gun control edicts don’t stop them…Gun-grabbers want the public to think the greater danger applies to them as opposed to the criminal population that exhibits significantly higher incidences and rates of domestic violence.”

Women are the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners in the country and don’t think the left hasn’t noticed. The number of black women, the base of the Democratic Party, that owns a legal gun has risen fastest of all. Expose them to real facts, and those women are far less likely to be open to giving up the one thing that offers them protection.

What the APJH didn’t consider and the New York Times doesn’t want those women to know is simple: take that criminal element out of the equation, and responsible citizens are quite capable of owning firearms without a significant increase in danger to themselves.

To see that fact doesn’t require multi-million-dollar foundation grants or untold hours of “expert research.” The membership of the NRA is probably the most heavily armed civilian population on earth but the domestic homicide rate among them is nowhere close to that of those reflected in the APJH study.

The Giffords Law Center began a recent article by stating categorically, “Guns increase the probability of death in incidents of domestic violence.” That is true, but again, nowhere is a correlation made between legally owned guns and domestic violence.

Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D., in his seminal work, The Perversion of Science and Medicine, warns his colleagues against “The abandonment of medical ethics in order to achieve political goals.” Perhaps the media should be reminded of the same thing.