{"id":76256,"date":"2022-01-18T01:39:47","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T07:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=76256"},"modified":"2022-01-18T01:41:46","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T07:41:46","slug":"76256","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=76256","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

BLUF:
\nTo Biden and Democrats, violent crime is a gun crime problem, but they ignore that\u00a092% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns<\/a>. And they ignore that defensive guns uses are\u00a0four to five times more common than gun crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that the media could do a much better job of asking politicians such as Biden tough questions on crime. If we want to save lives and protect people from violence, we need those questions asked.<\/p>\n

What Reporters Should Ask Biden About Guns at His Promised Press Conference on Wednesday<\/a><\/p>\n

President Biden\u2019s\u00a0remarks<\/a>\u00a0after the hostage situation at the synagogue in Texas leave more questions than answers.<\/p>\n

What were the motivations for the attack occur? A full day after a Pakistani Muslim attacked a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath to gain the release of Aafia Siddiqui described as the \u201cLady of al Qaeda,\u201d Biden doesn\u2019t know. The synagogue was near where Siddiqui is held. But when asked why the attacker targeted that synagogue, Biden again responded that he didn\u2019t know but promised more at a press conference on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Those answers are surely much better than the answers given by the FBI on Saturday, where they were not sure of the motive but\u00a0ruled out<\/a>\u00a0the attack being \u201cspecifically related to the Jewish community.\u201d The investigation should go forward, but it is troubling that the FBI\u2019s immediately concluded no connection between a radical Pakistani Muslim trying to free a prominent al Qaeda member and an attack on a synagogue. The \u201cmassive backlash<\/a>\u201d\u00a0forced<\/a>\u00a0the FBI to walk back its claim.<\/p>\n

But there are other important problems with Biden\u2019s comments. While he concedes that \u201cyou can\u2019t stop something like this if someone is on the street buying something from somebody else on the street,\u201d what he does know is that this type of attack occurs because \u201cthere\u2019s so many guns that have been sold of late; it\u2019s just ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

His first suggested solution? Background checks. Presumably, he means background checks on the private transfer of guns \u2013 so-called \u201cuniversal background checks.\u201d The problem is that even if such a law had been in effect and perfectly enforced, it wouldn\u2019t have stopped one mass public shooting this century.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t just Biden. Background checks have been the first go-to solution after every mass public shooting from when Obama was president to the present. In 2016, after listing a series of mass public shootings that background checks wouldn\u2019t have stopped, ABC\u2019s Jonathan Karl\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) \u201cwhy are we focusing on things that have nothing to do with the massacres that we are responding to?\u201d Murphy never responded with an example but instead argued that \u201cwe can\u2019t get into that trap\u201d and concluded that \u201cso this has to be broader than just responding to the tragedy that happened three days ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is the only time I can find a reporter asking a politician who advocated background checks to prevent mass public shootings. Why don\u2019t reporters ask other politicians such as Biden this question? You would think listeners care to know whether these laws actually make a difference.<\/p>\n

There are follow-up questions that reporters could ask. For example, when Kamala Harris\u00a0claims<\/a>\u00a0that the background check system \u201chas kept more than 3 million firearms out of the hands of dangerous people\u201d reporters should hopefully know enough that claim is wrong.<\/p>\n

Since the Brady background checks began in 1994, there have been 3.8 million initial denials. However, it is one thing to stop a felon from buying a gun. It is quite another to stop a law-abiding citizen from buying a gun just because their name is similar to a felon\u2019s. In 2017, for example, there were 112,000 initial denials for supposedly attempted prohibited purchases, but\u00a0just 12 federal prosecutions for prohibited people trying to buy guns<\/a>\u00a0by June 2018. These are extremely easy cases to prosecute (after all, the criminal would have lied under oath in illegally trying to buy the gun), but the reason is that the rest of\u00a0these weren\u2019t real cases<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The background check system is a mess. The mistakes stop minorities through no fault of their own from buying guns. The error rate for black males is three times their share of the population. And these mistakes are easy to fix with reasonable changes — just requiring that the federal government meet the same standards for doing background checks that private companies have to meet.<\/p>\n

Another question reporters could ask is whether this attack occurred in yet another place where civilians were banned from having guns. Former members of the Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas claim that the very left-wing Rabbi \u201cdidn\u2019t allow his member (including myself) to be armed during services.\u201d Whether this attacker knew the characteristics of this synagogue,\u00a094% of the successful mass public shooters<\/a>\u00a0pick places where victims aren\u2019t allowed to defend themselves. The national media constantly\u00a0ignores dozens<\/a>\u00a0of what the police say would otherwise have been mass public shootings if a legal concealed handgun permit holder hadn\u2019t been present.<\/p>\n

This last point is related to Biden\u2019s troubling response that these types of attacks occur because \u201cthere\u2019s so many guns that have been sold of late; it\u2019s just ridiculous.\u201d It ignores that people are buying the guns as violent crime soars because the government \u2013 from prosecutors to police to jails \u2013 isn\u2019t doing its job to protect them.<\/strong> It ignores the evidence from forty years of the NCVS that having a gun is by far the safest course of action when a criminal confronts someone. And that the people who benefit the most from firearms are people who are the most likely victims of violent crime (poor blacks who live in high crime urban neighborhoods) and relatively physically weaker people (primarily women and the elderly).<\/p>\n

To Biden and Democrats, violent crime is a gun crime problem, but they ignore that\u00a092% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns<\/a>. And they ignore that defensive guns uses are\u00a0four to five times more common than gun crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that the media could do a much better job of asking politicians such as Biden tough questions on crime. If we want to save lives and protect people from violence, we need those questions asked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BLUF: To Biden and Democrats, violent crime is a gun crime problem, but they ignore that\u00a092% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns. And they ignore that defensive guns uses are\u00a0four to five times more common than gun crimes. The bottom line is that the media could do a much better job of … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76256"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76258,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76256\/revisions\/76258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}