The Trace sent an email wondering what is going on.
Shortly after the pandemic began, my colleague Daniel Nass started monitoring data that could show how the crisis might affect gun violence. As we shared in this newsletter last week, he found that while overall crime rates had gone down across the country, gun violence was a glaring exception to the trend — with fatal shootings up 6 percent nationwide in the last six weeks compared with the same period in each of the past three years.
So Good People stayed home (many armed to the teeth). Violent criminals are being let out because of “mercy” while cops are forced to go around, wasting time and arresting moms who take their kids to the park after a month of having them locked in or sending patrol boats and SUVs to arrest ONE guy paddling ALONE in the ocean.
Dear The Trace: When you leave the cities without cops and a continuous drug trade (Oh yes, addicts did not kick the habit all of the sudden), shootings will occur.
Hat Tip Roger G.
That’s the thing about anti gunners. They themselves largely ignore laws that they dislike: immigration, marijuana possession, etc. while assuming that criminals will obey laws on gun possession and ignoring that it is their own drug dealer that is the very criminal committing the crimes and their own drug purchasing that is funding it.
A six-percent increase in “fatal shootings” compared to the same period in the last three years, eh?
I’m not an expert statistician, but a couple of questions leap out at me…
…what is the margin of error in your survey?
…why only look back three years, not five, ten, or fifty?
…how does the number of “fatal” shootings compare to “non-fatal” shootings in the same period?
…did you control for weather conditions?
…did you control for economic conditions?
…what is the source of your raw data?
Statistics are useless without information about sources, a decent timeframe, and an honest margin of error. 100% of the people I asked this morning agree!
As we’ve already seen before, they like to lump in every shooting to beef up the numbers. Including self-defense, accidents, police shootings, and suicides. Hmm, didn’t I read somewhere that the lockdown has caused a spike in suicides?