In the Bruen case the dissenting justices appealed to emotions to justify why they didn’t want to follow the law.
Justice Thomas put it just right: The two step process is one step to far.
Previous to the Bruen decision the courts in gun rights unfriendly areas would start with “We’ll stipulate that the law violates the 2nd amendment BUT…” at which point the second amendment goes away. These courts always found that the state had compelling reasons to abridge and infringe on our rights.
In order for those emotional appeals to actually work, there have to be enough horrible stories to touch people. You need stories that allow the people to connect with the evil and heartbreak. “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”.
Where to get those number? Those stories? Those scary numbers?
“There have been more mass shootings than days in 2022!!!!”
Only when you use the “right” definitions and the right sources.
When the CDC was advocating for gun control they did studies and the numbers were cooked. Even so they couldn’t hide the fact that the number of DGU was way higher than the number of people killed with firearms. So when they were no longer able to advocate for gun control, they stopped studying violence involving guns.
The gun grabbing media and politicians had to turn to other sources. They turned to people like the Giffard’s and Everytown and Moms Demand and Brady. The problem was that nobody trusted these sources. If you can’t use the numbers from the NRA you can’t use the numbers from people with this much conflict of interest. It didn’t stop them, but it slowed them down.
Thus enters the Gun Violence Archive. This is a group of people, it started with just one person, that started looking in media reports for any and all incidents involving guns. They then made a record of that incident and reported it.
Suddenly there were hundreds of incidents. The only problem was that it didn’t match the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics.
What it was good for is scare numbers”
“Since the start of this year (2022), there have been 277 reported mass shootings — an average of more than one per day. See Gun Violence Archive,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in June in the opening paragraph.
In other words, the GVA is not at all scientific, its data is hand picked and questionable. Anybody that actually looks at their individual incidents soon finds multiple errors. And they use their own definitions and play loose with those definitions.
All to get those “Scary numbers”
The media and the politicians eat it up because it matches their confirmation bias. So much so that Supreme Court Justices feel comfortable quoting GVA numbers. It is sick.
Just remember, when Obama told the CDC to study violence involving guns after a couple of years the CDC came back with numbers that were so bad for the gun grabbers that they quietly buried the report.