A man was fired from a sporting goods store for stopping a thief from stealing a gun and several boxes of ammo.
I can understand many businesses having non-interference policies but when you have a bad guy stealing a gun that will ultimately be used in another crime, you have to at least acknowledge extenuating circumstances, right?
CDC, in Surveys It Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence that Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns
Brian Doherty |
Many people who support gun control are angry that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are not legally allowed to use money from Congress to do research whose purpose is “to advocate or promote gun control.” (This is not the same as doing no research into gun violence, though it seems to discourage many potential recipients of CDC money.)
But in the 1990s, the CDC itself did look into one of the more controversial questions in gun social science: How often do innocent Americans use guns in self-defense, and how does that compare to the harms guns can cause in the hands of violent criminals?
Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck conducted the most thorough previously known survey data on the question in the 1990s. His study, which has been harshly disputed in pro-gun-control quarters, indicated that there were more than 2.2 million such defensive uses of guns (DGUs) in America a year.
Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.
Kleck’s new paper—” What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses? “—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.
Those polls, Kleck writes,
are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).
Kleck was impressed with how well the survey worded its question: “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?” Respondents were told to leave out incidents from occupations, like policing, where using firearms is part of the job. Kleck is impressed with how the question excludes animals but includes DGUs outside the home as well as within it.
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
For those who wonder exactly how purely scientific CDC researchers are likely to be about issues of gun violence that implicate policy, Kleck notes that “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.”
NPR revisited the DGU controversy last week, with a thin piece that backs the National Crime Victimization Survey’s lowball estimate of around 100,000 such uses a year. NPR seemed unaware of those CDC surveys.
El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke launched his longshot campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) this week. The media went into full ‘circle the wagons’ mode almost immediately to cover up two big lies in his announcement speech.
His big lies happen at 2:30 in the video.
He claims El Paso, TX is the safest city in Texas, and in the United States. Both claims are patently false. However, when you Google his announcement, the media coverage, for the most part, does not acknowledge he said these two things. They rewrite his speech to say something to the effect of ‘he noted El Paso was one of the safest cities,’ or other similar revisions. Saying El Paso is the safest city in Texas and the US is very different from saying it is one of the safest cities. Which is a dubious claim on its own anyway.
While local politicians from San Diego to El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley routinely claim that their crime statistics are continuously low, in reality those statistics don’t account for federal crimes that took place in their city such as kidnappings, drug trafficking and other spillover crimes.
Beto, and indeed many others in El Passo, have been using this ‘safest city’ propaganda for a while now. It’s just that, propaganda.
Niche.com’s 2016 rankings have El Paso as the 37th safest city. Not bad, but far from the safest city in the US.
Neighborhood Scout has El Paso in the bottom third for safety. A far cry from safest city.
Rape and assault in El Paso actually outpaces the national average.
Texas Monthly has El Paso ranked 13th for safest city in Texas. Not number 1.
Things are closer to the middle of the pack in El Paso and Laredo, which place at #13 and #10, respectively. The murder rate in each city is low, at 1.4 and 1.5 (Brownsville also comes in at 1.4, which is the second-lowest behind Abilene at 0.6). The numbers in El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen are all slanted heavily toward aggravated assault.
Safewise.com has El Paso as the 77th safest city in Texas. Again, not number 1.
The point is that El Paso isn’t the safest city in Texas, or the United States. Even if it is relatively safe, but the jury is out on that.
So then, why would major media outlets across the country based in places like New York and D.C. go to such lengths to change what Beto O’Rourke said? Where are the ad nauseam fact-checks from those same media outlets on Republicans for Beto’s comments? Where’s the cries from major media of “fake news!,” and the like?
You won’t find them. Beto is a Democrat running against boogieman number two, Ted Cruz. The media wants to bury Cruz, and Trump and their factually correct border narrative. So they chose to cover up Beto’s lies to prevent a gaffe out of the gate.
MILO Resigns from Breitbart News – Breitbart
Milo Yiannopoulos announced at a Tuesday New York City press conference his decision to resign as Breitbart Tech editor.
A Response to Milo’s ‘Defense of Pedophilia’ – HYPELINE News
Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos denied “defending pedophilia” after CNN’s Jake Tapper and others called him out Sunday for recorded remarks, recorded a year ago, regarding “pedophilia”.
While American media attacks Trump on crime in Sweden, I discovered the truth from Sweden’s government. Crime is not in decline in Sweden as MSM outlets have suggested.
FLASHBACK: Sweden is seen as Europe’s most liberal nation, but violent crime is soaring | Daily Mail Online
This week, the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven admitted that his country faced a crisis. On Thursday, it reinstated border controls, carrying out identity checks on passengers travelling by train across the strait from Denmark, and those arriving at ferry terminals in the south, to ‘maintain public order’.
Trump comment highlights dramatic rise in Swedish crime rate – Israel National News
Chief Stefan Sinteus wrote in an open letter about the “upward spiral of violence.” Sinteus is not merely dealing with typical crimes that any modern city would witness Malmo had 52 hand grenade attacks in 2016 alone, a jump from 48 attacks in 2015, according to figures provided by the Swedish Police Authority.
1 – According to Swedish Crime Prevention Council (bra.se) statistics, all reported crimes increased 9.7% since 2010.
Riots in the Stockholm suburb Trump mentioned in speech | Daily Mail Online
Riots have broken out in the Swedish suburb that Donald Trump referred to in his speech about immigration problems.
Ten Reasons Sweden’s ‘Multicultural Utopia’ Is Massively Failing
Police are quitting their jobs in huge numbers.
One of the regular segments of my show is highlighting fake hate. Nearly all of the ‘hate crimes’ over the past several years that go viral have ended up being fabricated hoaxes designed to push a false victim narrative while peddling hate themselves. Real victims rarely seek out publicity, and they almost never set up GoFundMe pages.
Yet another example …
[contentcards url=”http://www.advocate.com/crime/2016/6/28/weho-sheriff-says-gay-youtuber-faked-hate-crime” target=”_blank”]
Learn the lesson here. If you see a ‘hate crime’ story in the media, don’t automatically believe it.
Also, don’t believe everything in a story that isn’t citing a legitimate source with links. Here’s why …
“LGBT people are the minority group most likely to be targeted for hate crimes, according to FBI statistics. So there are a lot more real stories than fictional.”
Oh really? That was in the same article. Of course, no citation was made, and my background already tells me it’s bogus. Challenge accepted!
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
48.3 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race.
18.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
17.1 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
12.3 percent were victimized because of bias against ethnicity.
1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
1.4 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
0.6 percent (40 individuals) were victims of gender bias. (Based on Table 1.)https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2014/topic-pages/victims_final
That’s 2014 data on the FBI’s website.
It should be noted that the FBI’s data has some problems with regards to racial bias hate crimes. You see, a lot of hate crimes committed against whites don’t get categorized as hate crimes. There are also very few hate crimes committed in the US, but you wouldn’t no it based on media hype. With that said, we aren’t talking about that necessarily. The author of this article stated FBI data shows LGBT people are the most targeted for hate crimes.
As you can see, hate crimes based on race occur nearly twice as much as those directed towards LGBT victims. So race, not sexual orientation leads the pack in hate crimes.
I’d still like to remind you that Americans rank as one of the least racist people on the planet.
Many will like say that hate crimes based on race shouldn’t be all inclusive. Each individual race counts as a minority group (minus white people, of course), while LGBT is its own group. They could argue that the LGBT group is targeted more than any other individual group (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, etc.). However, that still isn’t true.
Among single-bias hate crime incidents in 2014, there were 3,227 victims of racially motivated hate crime.
Of the 1,248 victims targeted due to sexual-orientation bias.
You have to subtract 1.5% from the sexual-orientation bracket because they were hate crimes against heterosexuals, and don’t count as LGBT hate crimes. The new number is 1,229 total victims of anti-LGBT hate crimes in 2014.
Meanwhile, 62.7% of racial hate crimes were committed against blacks. That’s 2,023 of the 3.227 racially motivated hate crimes.
There were 794 more hate crimes just against blacks in 2014 than there were against the entire LGBT community.
Even if you added all 109 gender identity hate crime victims to expand LGBT to LGBTQ you still are well short of the hate crimes experienced by just blacks.
Any way you cut it, the article’s assertion that the LGBT community is the most targeted minority group for hate crimes is patently false.
Exit question: Is this gay guy threatening to shoot Republican Senators a hate crime?