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NewsFocus Exclusive |
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A Special Report On The Gun Debate |
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Media
Using Deception To Falsely Claim US Crime Rise Despite a 2011 New York Times article revealing data that shows violent crime was at a 40 year low... or despite a 2011 BBC article that claims US violent crime has been dropping for over twenty years... or despite FBI statistics that show that violent crime has plummeted over 50 percent in the last 15 years... and despite the fact that the murder rate has dropped by over 60 percent or that murders by gun are down for the 5th straight year.... the corporate mainstream media appears hell bent on manipulating recent crime figures, alleging that violent crime is on the rise by 18 percent over the last year. Nothing could be further from the truth in regards to violent crime. As a matter of fact, the corporate MSM has gone out of its way to manipulate the numbers, apparently in a deceptive attempt to make its case for gun control in the US... even though the FBI's own statistics show that gun violence is down. Fact: Guns are the third weapon of choice in aggravated assault, barely beating out knives. Here are the most recent FBI statistics...
The FBI UCR chart below reveals the most recent statistics, based off of 2011 figures. (They will not release 2012 until sometime in 2013.) These FBI statistics reveal that in a massive population of 310-million people, there were only 12,664 murders by gun in 2011. That is a paltry figure compared to the overall population. Out of those stats, only 323 murders were committed with some sort of long rifle, yet for some reason they are seeking to take away the one weapon that is a threat, not to the population, but to an organized police state, or an infantry, that would attempt to assault the population. This is a fact. Handguns were the cause of the bulk of gun murders, but they are no match to an organized infantry. They do not shoot as far, nor do they have the long distance accuracy of a long rifle. Only the long rifle is a threat to a growing police state. So, you have to ask yourself, why is someone trying to take away long rifles, rather than handguns? A killer can cause just as much damage in a gun free zone with a handgun as they can a long rifle. As another matter of fact, a handgun is preferred in a close quarters situation, compared with a long rifle. It is much easier to aim a handgun in a short distance, as opposed to a long rifle. One other fact that the media is missing... "assault weapons" are already banned in the US. A true assault rifle is an automatic weapon; a machine gun. No one is allowed automatic weapons in the US, except for the military. Semi-automatic weapons, even with large capacity clips, are not considered, by definition, as assault weapons.
CNN has been in lockstep with the rest of the media, for not reporting the actual facts as they relate to gun violence, facts that they are well aware of. Once you know the real story you will realize that CNN's Soledad O'Brien, and UK fugitive Piers Morgan, both should have known better, yet both viciously attacked noted gun crime expert, Professor John Lott. The ever arrogant Morgan had the temerity to call Lott a liar on the air, while the ever clueless O'Brien tried to rebuff Lott's factual evidence with her own personal dismay, literally at a loss for words, with no salient points or tenable argument, saying in frustration, "your position completely boggles me." Facts have a way of doing that to those who are ignorant, uninformed, blindly stupid, or perhaps pushing an orchestrated agenda. Let's examine the facts. First off, the evidence against CNN. This once heralded news giant published two stories, both only twelve days apart, which are clearly at odds with each other: U.S. violent crime up for first time in years and U.S. violent crime down for fifth straight year. Both of these articles were written by the same person, CNN Justice Producer Terry Frieden.
As you will see from the story links, the first article was published on October 17th, while the latter appeared on October 29th, respectively coinciding with the yearly release of data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Both of these are government agency reports, although the two appear to be as different as night and day. One thing is most certain though, because of their publication of both the BJS and the FBI UCR stats, CNN obviously knows full well about the truth regarding the decline of violent crime in the US, yet they chose instead to sic their single-minded media pit-bulls on a tenured professor who has literally written the book on violent crime in America. As the author of "More Guns. Less Crime, John Lott has done his homework, and has become a noted authority on gun violence in America. After watching the raucous discourse and adversarial manner in which CNN went after Lott, one might also draw the conclusion that their invitation for him to appear on their network was not to glean insight into gun violence, but rather to ridicule him personally, while attacking his work and potentially denigrating his position as an authority on such gun violence. For the record, Mr. Lott does not claim to be a 2nd amendment activist. He openly told Soledad O'Brien that he merely reports on gun violence in the US. So, why would CNN go to great lengths in an attempt to make such a mockery of a noted gun crime expert? When a news organization invites a well researched expert to be an on-air guest, it is usually with the utmost respect for their seasoned experience and their well researched insight. It is generally taboo in good journalism to rip apart the integrity of a respectable guest, for two reasons: Number one, you run the risk of appearing to your viewers as a bully, or the bad guy, thus alienating your audience. Number two, you also run the risk of scaring off any potential future guests who certainly do not want to be publicly assaulted on-air with an adversarial hit piece, generally known as ambush journalism or attack journalism. It is fairly safe to assume that CNN knew exactly what they were doing in trying to defame a well researched author, to discredit his standing for anyone who might be viewing their agenda driven news hit piece. CNN, like the rest of the corporate mainstream media, is purposefully driving the agenda to take away our guns. When you look at the facts, it's hard to rationalize anything else. Now, let's get to the real meat of the issue here, there are obviously two sets of crime statistics, the BJS and the UCR data. The FBI's UCR is widely considered the more reliable indicator of violent crime, yet the media has seen fit to only address the more unfavorable statistics from the BJS, which provides decidedly deceptive data in two ways that make their crime statistics quite misleading. Here is how the BJS does that... First off, the BJS combines simple assault, a crime with no weapon involved, with that of violent aggravated assault. That is very misleading, because now you're lumping apples with oranges, two entirely different things, other than the fact that crime is crime and fruit is fruit. In order to feign a rise in US violent crime, the BJS added 3.9 million "simple assaults" from 2011 to their statistics on "violent assaults." Color it any way you like, but when it comes to the media, it seems wholly disingenuous to include simple assault in the conversation when you're trying to ascertain a rise in gun violence, or violent crime. The media should know better. A much more accurate assessment of violent crime can be measured through the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which looks at nothing but aggravated assault, such as murder, robbery and rape. It does not include simple assault, as the BJS does. So, let's be sure to clarify and be certain to make the point here... "violent" crime is the issue being addressed right now in the US, after the mass shootings. We are not debating simple assault, which deals with no weapons at all. To combine these two statistics, violent crime with simple assault, is, at best, remarkably misleading, if not deceptive and quite deceiving. Simple assault can include domestic abuse, such as marital conflict, or a barroom fight. This is not violent crime, as noted by the more accurate and more reliable UCR. Secondly, and perhaps the most egregious offense, the BJS combines empirical data on violent crime from law enforcement databases, with outcall polling that they conduct through telephone surveys from their National Crime Survey, also known as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). This mixed combination of data is an outright aberration as far as statistics gathering goes. Any statistician worth his salt will tell you the same, these are two different animals... hard core finite data versus human recall. The two do not hold the same degree of validity. Again, it's apples and oranges. The important thing to understand about outcall polling is, it is entirely dependent on the honesty and integrity of the individuals being polled. A person's own recall, or their perceptions of an event, are not exactly hard data. It is soft data, the kind you get from focus groups or outcall polling. Hard data is quantitative data, pulled from statistical research, from a database of factual evidence. Make no mistake about it, hard data and soft data are two different things and the two should never be combined together, if you want irrefutable data. If conjecture is what you're after, well then, have at it and knock yourself out. Now, let's look at the data being expressed here, that which they falsely attribute to an 18 percent rise in violent crime over the last year in the US. The statistics expressed in the new BJS crime figures represent a jump from 19.3 out of 1000 persons, with 22.5 for every 1000 persons. That is not a sharp jump in crime. Number one, these are diminutive numbers when you look at them for what they are. The statistic of 19.3 out of 1000 equates to a paltry 1.93 percent. The big jump that they allege is barely a minor skip, rising to a mere 2.25 percent for every 1000 people. That is indeed very small. Given those tiny percentages, keep in mind that the bump in those numbers came from the incorrect addition of soft data and hard data. It is laughable to entertain such a slight rise in so-called "violent crime," especially when you realize that they pad those numbers with simple assault, and yet these new statistics are the best they could come up with. To be clear, serious "violent" crime includes aggravated assault with a weapon, armed robbery, rape, and sexual assault, Last year, an estimated 1.8 million of these crimes occurred, but according to CNN's own story "the increase from the previous year was calculated to be statistically insignificant." Statistically insignificant, essentially meaning no major change! It is curious as to how they arrived at an 18 percent increase, because my math, unless it is flawed, shows only a 14 percent increase, when using the undeniably skewed BJS numbers. Let's go back to soft data for a moment, specifically the National Crime Survey. When doing call out surveys, a margin of error is attributed to the data, based on how accurate the dataset is, and if it truly reflects across a larger population. The most accurate way to get reliable outcall polling data is with a very large sample to extrapolate data from. The larger the sample size, the more reliable that data is in relation to a larger population base. Conversely, the smaller the sample size, the less accurate the data. For this reason a "margin of error" is assigned to outcall polling. For example... a three percent margin of error is deemed more acceptable than a six percent margin of error and here is why. The margin of error means that your data results can swing in either direction. That means, with a margin of error of three, a survey rating of 20 could in actuality be a 17, or it could be a 23. If the study were conducted again with similar numbers, but with a different group, the margin or error should fall somewhere in the same range as the last survey. With this said, it would be nice to know the margin of error contained within the National Crime Survey, now known as the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS for short. The NCVS methodology does not indicate such a number. So, the bottom line here is... the BJS statistics are pure BS when you try to ascertain "violent crime" in the US. So now, ask yourself this, why is the corporate mainstream media trying to capitalize on the BJS statistics at this time, rather than reporting the more germane and much more accurate UCR data? Why did CNN allow Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan to dance around statistics that they themselves had on hand in their own newsroom? The only reasonable answer is, to get you scared. This is all about the new gun control agenda. They are doing the same thing that they did after 9/11, fomenting false fear to sell a nefarious secret agenda for a US police state. After all, they refused to report on NDAA 2012, which circumvents Posse Comitatus, nor HR 658, which allows the use of 30,000 spy drones over America. The media is undeniably complicit in the push for a US police state. There are clearly statistics out there that prove conclusively that violent crime is still on the decline, even with the recent spate of mass shootings. The UCR data proves just that. To quote CNN's own article, which quotes the UCR report: Compared with 2010, the new figures show violent crime down 3.8 percent overall. Property crime was down 0.5 percent. Among violent incidents reported to police, murders were down about 0.7 percent, robberies dropped 4 percent, aggravated assaults declined 3.9 percent, and forcible rapes were down 2.5 percent. Are you starting to get the picture here? Again, to repeat what was said at the start of this article...
So why is the corporate mainstream media trying to say that we have a serious gun violence issue rising in America? CIA data-mining asset Google also appears to be just as responsible for pushing the false statistics. A search using "violent crime in America" yields the following links, all decrying the false notion of an 18 percent rise in violent US crime... The Huffington Post, Salon, Christian Science Monitor, FOX News, CNN News, RT News, UPI News, and the Washington Times all come to the forefront of a Google search, and all disseminating the false BJS data. Only the link for MSNBC News seems to have the correct UCR data. With this said, it still only took this reporter less than ten minutes to find the correct data on the internet; something the mainstream media should also be able to accomplish. The point of this article is, the corporate mainstream media is clearly driving an agenda for gun control and a repeal of the 2nd amendment. They are quite obviously complicit in perpetuating the false gun violence ruse. They will try to tell you that all of America is behind the ban on weapons, yet the real indicator of the American mindset seems to be clear... after every mass shooting, gun sales have gone through the roof. The MSM has been tragically remiss in reporting this trend, let alone the current gun run since Sandy Hook, which has all gun dealers out of supply, with manufactures scrambling to catch up with the demand. So much for the media narrative that all of America is behind the current effort to ban guns, particularly semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazine clips. It should also be noted, just to clear up the media fallacy, that semi-automatic weapons are not "assault weapons." Only automatic weapons are classified as true assault weapons, but that's obviously not the message that the media wants to perpetuate for their false narrative on gun violence. Once again, this just goes to show you that the media is pushing a carefully engineered agenda. It also proves that CNN and its bloviating blowhards, Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan, were clearly out of line and unjustified in their attack on gun violence expert John Lott. They shot their mouths off with rancor and venom, completely incoherent of the real facts. They indeed owe Mr. Lott an apology. This reporter can only hope that Lott decides to sue the fugitive Morgan for slander after being called a liar on public television. The greater point is, violent gun crime is not rising in America. Anyone who says anything to the contrary is, once again, either ignorant, uninformed, blindly stupid, or perhaps pushing an orchestrated agenda that benefits a US police state and a concerted CFR push for a new world order dictatorship. In the case of Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan, this reporter chooses to believe that they are all of the above. Article Copyright © 2012 by Tim Watts See also: The Sandy Hook Murders Are Not As We Are Led To Believe Obama And Biden Forget Their Campaign Speeches On Guns CNN Host And UK Wire-Tapping Fugitive Piers Morgan Wants Our Guns Guns Save Lives (Stories of gun owners who have stopped crime) Sign The Orion Talk Radio Equal Gun Justice Petition
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, murders by gun has dropped for five straight years in a row, even with mass shootings included in the statistics. The media is indeed crying wolf over the gun control issue, most disingenuously, if not very deceptively.
According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) baseball bats and clubs are the leading weapon of choice for violent crime. So why are we not asking for the registration and restriction of baseball bats? Is it really that silly? We just had to ask.
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