How to Lie About Gun Politics With Facts

When I was in school as a wee lad all too many years ago, I remember being taught the difference between fact and opinion. A fact is something that can be verified, while an opinion can’t be.

Fair enough, right?

Unfortunately, no one told us to be on the lookout for people being selective about how they present facts in order to advance either a lie or an opinion.

However, I found a very good example of just how that works earlier today. This one, from The Sanford Daily, talks about how pro-gun groups spend big after school shootings.

Since 1999, over 420 school shootings have occurred in the United States, exposing more than 390,000 students to gun violence. From Sandy Hook to Uvalde, in the aftermath of each tragedy come familiar rituals of prayers and calls for reform. Yet, Congress has stalled on significant gun safety reform for decades.

A recent study by researchers at Stanford Law School (SLS) investigated why this gap between public concern and federal action persists, despite broad popular support for gun safety reforms. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claimed that political spending from gun policy groups might explain this trend.

“Politicians send hopes and prayers without actually doing anything. That is because there is money and money speaks,” said Eric Baldwin, one of the study’s co-authors and a postdoctoral fellow at SLS. 

By analyzing financial data from 2000 to 2024, Baldwin, and co-author Takuma Iwasaki, a third-year J.S.D. candidate, found that after school shootings, pro-gun groups increased contributions in competitive House districts by 2,820% if the shooting took place within two months before an election and roughly  31% if not close to an election. 

Interesting, because this sounded a bit familiar. I remember writing about a study that looked at spending from both pro- and anti-gun groups in a similar way.

Sure enough, I’d covered a report on this exact same study. The big difference was that this report included the fact that both sides increased spending, thus locking things in a bit of a stalemate.

It’s not until much later that, suddenly, it’s framed as the noble gun control groups trying to stem the tide against the forces of evil.

What happened here is that the author took the study, got a little selective in how to present it, and pretends that somehow the anti-gun groups are doing something nefarious when the anti-gun groups are spending damn near as much.

The facts about spending are what they are. These are facts because they can be verified.

But the author used these facts to present a narrative meant to reflect his own preconceived notions about who does what. He paints it like the groups trying to protect our gun rights are doing something wrong by protecting our right to keep and bear arms in light of terrible tragedies.

As we know from this study, the impact of the spending turns out to be a wash, which means that the status quo is maintained from before the incident, which seems like a relatively neutral outcome. Not the outcome I’d want, mind you, but a pretty neutral one.

That’s the problem for everyone involved in this, and the author’s presentation is nothing more than yet another example of the media inspiring the next generation of activists who want to pretend to be reporters.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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