GIGO:
Stands for “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” It means that if invalid data is entered in a computer program, the resulting output will also be invalid.
A year and a half ago, after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Joe Nocera, an Op-Ed columnist at the New York Times, asked me, an editorial assistant at the newspaper, to find out who gets shot in America every day.
Joe has a young child, and he was haunted by the fact that it could easily have been his own son in that classroom. We realized that we didn’t know who the majority of gun violence victims were, the people whose deaths didn’t make it onto a CNN broadcast.
Six weeks after Newtown, Joe wrote a column consisting of a few lines about shootings that had happened that week, presented without comment. He had a blog he wasn’t using, so starting the next day, I started writing at that blog by searching for America’s shooting victims.
The project began with just a couple of items unearthed during a Google news search, but after a few months I was searching ten pages deep — for “shooting,” “man shot,” “woman shot,” “child shot,” “teen shot” and “accidentally shot.” By the project’s end, the report featured 40 shootings a day. Of course, there were more, but I was only finding the ones reported in the news. This naturally limited my scope — most suicides aren’t reported at all.
via Who gets shot in America: What I learned compiling records of carnage for the New York Times.
Right out of the gate my first question was: So what the heck were you guys using as raw data? And the answer was obviously that they were just reprinting the press releases of whichever Gun Control organization was flavor of the month.
Then it was sad to see that the journalists of The Gray Lady could not figure where to get data other than the same clique that reprints more press releases and the occasional crime story but only if it sells papers or commercial space on TV. Apparently the best and the brightest are unaware of the CC and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report which comes tabulated 17 ways from Sunday in more flavors than Baskin Robbins.
And we are the dumb ignorant hillbillies….
The thing is they don’t want to know the facts because that will kill their prejudices and preconceived notions of who is committing these killings and who the victims are. We will just have to keep sharing the facts and provide the public with our side with outlets such as this blog.
You mean like learning that a lot of the victims of shootings are not generally nice people to begin with?
“Apparently the best and the brightest are unaware of the CC and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report which comes tabulated 17 ways from Sunday in more flavors than Baskin Robbins.”
Oh, they’re aware, but the UCR data doesn’t fit The Narrative, so obviously the UCR data is wrong. Therefore they must engage in a “study” of … [ahem] … Google news search results. ‘Cuz, y’know, THAT’s going to paint a complete picture.
As a press man myself, and one who has worked under a number of news directors, the issue is that “99.999% of people did not get shot today” doesn’t sell papers/airtime. “Man flashes gun and doesn’t get mugged” falls into the same category. And when a prominent shooting happens, you have a crying emotional side that comes off as very sympathetic and even when your director lets you get the other side, it is universally someone quoting dry statistics.
We need to keep a blog or a record of defensive gun uses. We need people that used guns in self defense to come forward and give us the human angle. Otherwise you have a page of statistics vs a crying mother, and the crying mother will always win.