Something You Are Not Likely To Hear From The Mainstream Media

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article quoting statistics on firearms homicides over the past 25 years. The numbers are not what you might expect.

The article reports:

Despite endless gun violence reports put forward by the establishment media, the dirty little secret is firearm homicides have plummeted over the past 25 years.

Yet most Americans, particularly Democrats, believe firearm murders have risen period.

When you consider the fact that the media chooses what it covers and what it doesn’t cover, the fact that most Americans are misinformed about gun violence is not a surprise.

The article includes some of the statistics:

But the reality is that the high water mark for firearm murders was 1994 while 2017, the most recent year with complete data on incidents, shows a sharp drop. There were “16,136 [firearm murders] in 1994” but only “10,982” in 2017.

And if looked at in terms of the murder rate, instead of simply the raw murder numbers, the drop in firearm homicides is even more evident.

For example, the FBI calculated “6.2 firearm murders per 100,000 people” in 1994, while the murder rate in 2017 was 3.38. And the murder rate was even lower than 3.38 in 2014.

An interesting correlation with the drop in firearm murders is the incredible expansion of private firearm ownership. In other words, the number of privately-owned firearms was increasing at the same time that the number of firearm murders was plummeting.

On December 4, 2013, Breitbart News reported a Congressional Research Service study showing “gun ownership climbed from 192 million firearms in 1994 to 310 million firearms in 2009.” At the same time, the “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate was cut in half over a roughly 17-year time period.

There are a few things at work here. First of all, criminals do not like to commit crimes in places where people are likely to be armed. Second of all, by providing wall-to-wall coverage of any mass shooting for days on end, the media puts the idea in our heads that these are common occurrences. The media is much less likely to cover events where an armed citizen protects himself or prevents a mass shooting.

I really don’t understand why the media aligns itself with the gun-control left. Do they not realize that they too will be left defenseless?

The President’s “Get Out Of Jail Free” Card

On Monday The Washington Times reported that in 2013 immigration officers released 36,000 immigrants from custody.

The article describes these immigrants:

Among the 36,000 immigrants whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released from custody last year there were 116 with convictions for homicide, 43 for negligent manslaughter, 14 for voluntary manslaughter and one with a conviction classified by ICE as “homicide-willful kill-public official-gun.”

The immigrants were in deportation proceedings, meaning ICE was trying to remove them from the country and could have held them in detention but released them anyway, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which published the numbers Monday. The Washington Times also obtained the data.

…The 36,007 criminal aliens counted in the data had more than 87,000 convictions among them: 15,635 for drunken driving, 9,187 for what ICE labeled “dangerous drugs,” 2,691 for assault, 1,724 for weapons offenses and 303 for “flight escape” — a category that would seem to make them bad candidates for release.

I will admit that I am having trouble figuring out the rationale behind releasing them rather than deporting them. Releasing these prisoners puts the safety of American citizens at risk. They should have been deported.

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