In the three months since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, daily coverage of the gun issue has become as predictable as a Hollywood script meeting. In fact, when it comes to most writing about guns and Congress, it is easy to conclude that there are only two styles of narrative—the emotional or the narrowly political.
Emotional: A recent tear-stained USA Today story about a Senate gun-control hearing began, “The father of a 6-year-old killed in last year’s Connecticut elementary school shooting wept as he urged a Senate panel Wednesday to pass legislation to prevent another gun massacre.” Equally wrenching was a Reuters dispatch earlier this month with the lede, “Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, returning to the site of the shooting rampage where she was gravely wounded, on Wednesday urged senators to ‘be courageous’ and support background checks for all gun buyers.”
Political: When bipartisan Senate negotiations over enhanced background checks between Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Tom Coburn broke down earlier in March, the Washington Post article included polling data showing that nearly 90 percent of voters support regulating sales at gun shows. Yet in its story, Politico theorized that, as a result of the impasse, the only proposal likely to win approval this year was a gun trafficking bill. That legislation, Politico explained, “is seen as far less important than the background checks proposal yet much easier to pass.”
Missing from these stories—and dozens like them—was policy context. Gun-control proposals are ranked based on the ferocity of likely opposition from the National Rifle Association rather than on the legislation’s potential ability to save lives. As a result, readers get the sense that an assault weapons ban would reduce gun violence more than expanded background checks, which in turn would be more effective than gun trafficking legislation. But this rock-paper-scissors hierarchy is entirely based on politics (what might pass Congress) rather what might prevent another massacre in an elementary school or movie theater.
Reporters on the gun-control beat often failed to offer evidence to suggest how many of America’s roughly 30,000 gun deaths per year would be prevented if any of these bills passed Congress—no way to judge or compare their value. Imagine if press coverage of the sequester never revealed that $85 billion in arbitrary cuts were at stake. Or if news stories on the withdrawal from Afghanistan forgot to mention that more than 2,100 American military personnel have died in that theater since 2001. Statistics like Congressional Budget Office cost estimates and think-tank calculations are a staple of policy debates in Washington in virtually every other arena other than gun legislation.
Granted, reliable statistics are hard to come by when it comes to firearms—in part because the NRA remains so adamantly opposed to effective record-keeping. As Slate acknowledges in its ongoing attempt to calculate the carnage since Newtown, “It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States.” In a surprising and laudable article that led the March 10 Sunday edition of The New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff reveal that, based on academic polling, gun ownership in America appears to have dramatically declined in the last four decades. The Times reporters concede that “detailed data on gun ownership is scarce” and note that the Gallup poll shows a higher ownership rate and a more moderate decrease over time.
Still, the fragmentary nature of information on guns is not a valid excuse for fact-free journalism. There are available clues that reporters could seek out suggesting the practical limitations and possible results of popular forms of gun control legislation.
Strongly agree! Yet there are hard reasons a serious and sane author might avoid the subject altogether.
Attempts to engage with writers of such serious articles are invariably lost in vitriolic trollery. I'm prone to ask questions about hard data (whether they exist, how old they are, where they're published, et al.), but somehow that simple act seems to mark me as an enemy to whichever side finds me first. I never know who'll label me a seditious traitor -- or worse. At least that deflects the filth away from the author, which I suppose allows him or her to survive to write substantively another day.
Why would an author even try, given the disincentives?
#1 Posted by Bel Campbell, CJR on Mon 18 Mar 2013 at 04:11 PM
You entire “analysis” flows from your personal belief that we need additional regulations on firearm ownership or what has become the liberal hysterical position of “we have to do something”! I would counter that we don’t have to do anything. Even though there are more gun owners than ever (even if the percentage of households who possess firearms has decreased) homicides are at a 50 year low .. something the “smart” analyses don’t mention too often. For example, the NYTimes editorial you cited made the claim that “After the ban expired, 37 percent of police departments reported noticeable increases in criminals’ use of assault weapons, according to a 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum.” But the Times failed to mention the conclusion of the report they were citing stated unequivocally that the researchers found no statistically significant evidence that the assault weapons ban or the ban on high capacity magazines had reduced murders from firearms.
In contrast, the NRA and its conservative allies go to ludicrous extremes by conjuring the specter of totalitarian government in response to even the most limited attempts at gun legislation.
Have you ever considered that the reason is because gun control advocates ultimate goal is complete and total disarmament of the civilian population? They have been quite open about their ends.
To that end, chew on this comparison: late term abortion is very unpopular (80% of Americans think it should be illegal according to Gallup) but whenever legislatures debate a ban on them, abortion rights advocates talk about back alley abortions “conjuring up the specter of totalitarian government” controlling women’s bodies. Why are there two completely different standards for how the press reports and “analyzes” constitutional rights? I think we all know the answer.
#2 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Mon 18 Mar 2013 at 05:59 PM
Should a free press imply that "political will" and "statistics" shall legitimate the decimation of my natural rights? *smh*
#3 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 18 Mar 2013 at 08:28 PM
Here's an excellent NYT piece dealing with gun violence committed by people under protective orders that offers some strong evidence (though iit seems to be more of a state-level than a federal issue):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/us/facing-protective-orders-and-allowed-to-keep-guns.html?hpw
#4 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Mon 18 Mar 2013 at 09:01 PM
"Have you ever considered that the reason is because gun control advocates ultimate goal is complete and total disarmament of the civilian population?"
--- Yeah, just like automobile registration led to automobile confiscation. Because as we all know, humans are incapable of making one rational decision at a time. And every single gun-control advocate in the United States actually has a secret agenda of "disarming the populace." There's NO SUCH THING as a reasonable American who thinks tighter gun laws could make our society safer, right Mike?
Honest to Christ, it's getting harder and harder to take you guys seriously when you trot out that absurd doomsday crap every single time gun laws are mentioned.
And to hear you whine about 30-round magazines in the name of "patriotism" is just disgusting. You aren't patriots. You are nationalists. There's a difference. Patriots don't think it's OK to shoot the cops just because they're enforcing a law you don't agree with.
#5 Posted by Justin, CJR on Tue 19 Mar 2013 at 07:11 PM
And this has what, precisely, to do with the trade of journalism, which is what CJR is supposed to cover?
Nothing. More leftist opinionating that makes false assertions.
To wit: "The roots of the problem of gun violence are, of course, the roughly 300 million firearms that are in private hands and are mostly legally owned."
No, of course, it's not. The roots of the problem are in urban gang warfare. Do Chicago and Detroit ring a bell?
Why don't you look deeper into the data about who commits most gun crimes, instead of repeating leftist mantras, or did you miss class the day they taught journalism in journalism school?
#6 Posted by newspaperman, CJR on Wed 20 Mar 2013 at 02:43 PM
Almost all crimes are committed with handguns, not "assault weapons." And a ban on assault weapons will not do much to stop suicide using guns. And even a ban on large magazines which I support would do little to discourage our relatively rare mass murderers.
So we should focus on reasonable things that can be passed. These include ending the "gun show loophole," severe penalties for straw buyers, severe penalties for felons who try to buy guns legally, and q universal data base that can be use to prevent violent people from possessing guns.
#7 Posted by Robert Rhodes, CJR on Thu 21 Mar 2013 at 07:24 PM