Well, of course, the media’s reporting on gun violence is awful and atrociously inaccurate

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Matt Vespa:

Cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war…for gun control. This appears to be the mantra of the left in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in San Bernardino. The perpetrators were officially identified yesterday as Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, both in their late-20s, who opened fire at a Christmas party for the county’s health department workers; Farook was a county employee of five years prior to his senseless rampage. They killed 14 and wounded up to 21 people in the worst mass shooting since Newtown in 2012. They were subsequently killed in a firefight with police and both were armed with AR15 rifles.

Yet, the liberal news media saw this as an opening to make their case, yet again, for gun control. Before the suspects were identified, or a motive was established, the LA Times’editorial board denigrated tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners by saying that our “infatuation with guns is bordering on a society-wide suicidal impulse.”

It’s absurd that one of the richest, freest, and most advanced societies in world history endures such a scourge with such equanimity. But there is hope. A Gallup poll in October found that 55% of Americans support stronger gun control measures, and other surveys have found that even a majority of NRA members support mandatory background checks — something the NRA itself has assiduously opposed. There is broad political support for stronger laws to address the nation’s gun addiction, but gun control advocates have so far been unable to counter the money and organizational heft of the NRA. It’s obscene that a single interest group is able to endanger an entire nation’s safety.

[…]

This crisis in American society must be combated through the ballot box, and through lobbying to loosen the iron grip the NRA holds on Congress and many state legislatures. That is where the pushback against this culture of death needs to occur. And it needs to occur now.

Three days prior, the Washington Post, in an editorial after the shooting at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said America’s “unacceptable” level of carnage could be traced back to our constitutionally protected access to firearms:

THE 57-year-old man charged in the murderous shooting spree at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado allegedly made remarks to police about “no more baby parts.” That has led some to speculate that antiabortion rhetoric sparked the rampage. The suspect’s history of aberrant behavior prompted others to theorize that mental illness was the culprit. In the early stages of the investigation, we don’t know what, if any, role was played by either of these factors. In the meantime it is worth restating the obvious: The one factor common to every terrible case of gun violence is access to guns.

[…]

So far this year, according to news reports collected by a Reddit community, there have been at least 351 mass shootings, or more than one a day.

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof was more measured in his response to the San Bernardino shooting. He acknowledged that the Republican effort to do something regarding mental health was a good policy initiative. Yet, he also repeated the long debunked statistic that 40 percent of all gun purchases were conducted without a background check, along with the pie-in-the-sky assumption that universal background checks makes us safer. All law-abiding Americans buy their firearms from dealers with federal firearms licenses, which require background checks on all sales. That is the law. Yes, private sales exist, but they represent a miniscule percentage of all sales (it’s in the single digits) and they’re mostly relegated to transactions among families (i.e. inheritance).

At the same time, he did admit that gun confiscation was simply an unrealistic goal. He also cited that Switzerland, like the U.S., has high rates of gun ownership since all men “spend many years as part-time members of the armed forces.” The result: low crime rates. Then, we came to the left’s boogeyman: the NRA:

Astonishingly, it’s perfectly legal even for people on the terrorism watch list to buy guns in the United States. More than 2,000 terrorism suspects did indeed purchase guns in the United States between 2004 and 2014, according to the Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog. Democrats have repeatedly proposed closing that loophole, but the National Rifle Association and its Republican allies have blocked those efforts, so it’s still legal.

[…]

When we tackled drunken driving, we took steps like raising the drinking age to 21 and cracking down on offenders. That didn’t eliminate drunken driving, but it saved thousands of lives.

For similar reasons, Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for purchases.

Okay; let’s begin.

I will give the LA Times some credit–they didn’t give the horrifically inflated figure on gun deaths that pro-gun control groups often peddle to make a case that America is a shooting gallery. As I’ve written previously, it’s not. Violent crime is at record lows, firearm-related homicides are down, and this editorial board knows that California is one of the most anti-gun states in the country, right?

California has long banned certain long guns that the left ridiculously calls “assault rifles” since 1989. It also has a universal background check law. Oregon also passed legislation mandating universal background checks for all firearms sales; it did nothing to stop Christopher Harper-Mercer from committing a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg back in October.

Moreover, yes, Gallup did report that Americans want more gun control, but if the editorial board read the whole poll–they would have found that 56 percent felt concealed firearms would make the country safer. Additionally, the Washington Post’s July analysis found that 57 percentfeel that guns help prevent crime. As with anything with polls, wording matters. In the wake of Newtown, 58 percent supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Yes, Gallup noted that support for a handgun ban is near record lows. The point: a handgun is a semiautomatic weapon. It merely means self-reloading, which adds to the growing evidence that the media and the progressive left know little about the nomenclature of firearms, let alone the laws that apply to them.

As for the Washington Post’s citing the 350+ mass-shooting statistic, it’s pure unadulterated nonsense. Stephen Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon reported that only 21 of the 355 shootings on this subReddit thread met the standards for the FBI classification of a mass shooting. Second, some of the incidents on the list aren’t even shootings, as indicatedby Mediaite’s Alex Griswold. Here’s one that he found:

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And of course we can see how effective laws against the making of IEDs worked to stop the couple from making pipe bombs.

The “D’s” all talk about “common sense guns laws needing to be passed. Which means the thousands we already have are nonsense.

How about some common sense drug laws too? Guess we don’t have any of those either. Heroin in some parts of the US is a scourge that is growing.

If we only had more common sense laws. Doh!

Just one more jerk of the political knee ought to do it.

These media clowns like to go on about the clout of the NRA, but they represent the will of their members…. the gooberment should be listening to them.

As for the Washington Post’s citing the 350+ mass-shooting statistic, it’s pure unadulterated nonsense.

The Guardian, a UK newspaper, has provided a helpful chart of U.S. mass shootings, covering the 1,066 days preceding San Bernardino. They define as a “mass shooting” any single shooting incident where four or more people are killed or wounded. That’s fairly straightforward.

There have been 1,052 such incidents in the U.S. over a period of 1,066 days. If the media’s reporting on the topic is awful, the inadequacy in question probably has to do with under-reporting.

@Greg:
Your article gets its statistics from “shooting ” tracker” a crowd funded group. Here’s a bit more information on this for you.
Enjoy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427985/media-mass-shootings-count-misleading