Media Makes Guns Out To Be the Bad Guy to Avoid Talking About an Uncomfortable Subject

It’s almost a foregone conclusion that dumb reporters and Democrats lie to us about guns. We’re used to it. But one thing that should stick in everyone’s craw is when police departments lie to us about guns.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it seems like a nice baseline standard to expect from public servants like the police is that they should be honest with the people they’re serving. Unfortunately, any police chief who is brave enough to tell the truth about inner city shootings has a career survival rate that could be measured in seconds.

Seven people died in gun homicides in Washington, DC between July 18 and 22, 2019. That seems like a lot and for most communities, it would be a lot. Unless you live in a big urban city, gun deaths are extremely rare to even hear about. You have to live in a place like Chicago, where it’s not unusual to have 40 shootings over a weekend, to see numbers like in DC. Anyway, here is how news station WTOP describes the police response to these shooting deaths:

“Since Thursday seven people have died in shootings in DC, among them an 11-year-old boy, and all the cases have one thing in common according to police: They involved illegal guns.”

Did you see the trick they pulled there? “Illegal guns?” (There’s actually one additional thing that all of the shootings had in common, but it’s now immoral for news stories to mention it.)

Ever since the Heller decision, DC gun laws have been scaled back from Defcon 11 Draconian to just Moderately Terrible and Unconstitutional. Guns are not illegal in Washington, DC any longer. As long as guns are registered (which is BS), they’re legal to own. Magazines are capped at 10 rounds, but otherwise, DC’s Moderately Terrible anti-gun laws aren’t much worse than in many other places.

When the police issue a statement that the guns themselves are illegal, it allows them to avoid talking about who is pulling the trigger in each of these incidents.

Six of the seven homicides are unsolved so far. In all six of those unsolved murders, police simply found the bodies. No murder weapons were found. So… how were these guns illegal? The police can’t possibly make that determination when they have no witnesses, no suspects and no information. The shootings happened so recently that they might not even have ballistics reports and calibers.

Rather than “illegal guns,” the real problem in DC and many other cities is that almost all of these were black-on-black killings. In the one incident where police did catch a suspect, the details are horrifying.

A carload of black youths was stopped at a gas station when they started yelling at another group of black youths. Cops say 29-year-old Tony McClam fired several shots into the vehicle, killing an 11-year-old boy.

In the first days after the shooting, however, the police were asking for tips in locating McClam and everyone with him. The description of the co-conspirators: A group ranging in age from 10 to the early 30s.

The rest of the shootings over the weekend in DC were black suspects shooting other black people, with the one exception being a black suspect who shot a white man.

Again, maybe I’m just old-fashioned. But when you have a group of kids as young as 10 shooting at a car filled with teenagers and killing an 11-year-old, the big social problem there is not the gun – or even an “illegal gun.”

But instead of berating the parents who were allowing their 10-year-olds to run around on a Thursday night shooting at each other, the DC police chief now wants stricter penalties for people who are caught without a gun permit.

And while the cops are saying on the one hand that these were “illegal guns” used in all of the shootings, they’re saying that the solution is to make guns… more illegaler.

Funny how that’s always the solution that we hear these days. But New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani took a different approach in the 1990s. He had the NYPD start making aggressive arrests for misdemeanor crimes – and a funny thing happened. When the police started making misdemeanor arrests for things like graffiti tagging, burglary and robbery rates fell.

Busting people who were obviously up to no good on smaller crimes caused New York’s murder rate to fall dramatically. Turns out that the same people who were dinking around and harassing people at gas stations were the same ones shooting the place up.

But the DC police chief would lose his job if he were to suggest something like that these days. Everyone knows that the cops are being “racist” if they get tough on crime.