Magazine disconnects are one of those things in the gun world that creates a topic of debate. Some people like them and some don’t. Everyone has their reasons for their opinions, of course, and like a lot of things, a lot of debate might happen but, at the end of the day, no one really cares all that much.
They don’t care because the simple fact is that it’s a choice. You can either opt for guns that have magazine disconnects or that don’t. This is the natural order of things. Let the market decide if these should be on every gun or not.
Unfortunately, as Cam noted over the weekend, NBC News doesn’t seem interested in that.
Lee Williams, over at The Gun Writer, didn’t just note what NBC News had to say, he basically ripped it apart.
Around 11 people are killed each year because their handguns lacked a magazine disconnect, according to a massive 4,600-word special report by NBC News, which was released Friday.
The story’s title tells you all you need to know about the content: “A simple device could help curb accidental gun deaths, but most firearms don’t have it.”
“Since 2000, at least 277 people have been killed in gun accidents in which the shooter believed the weapon was unloaded because the magazine had been dislodged or removed, an NBC News investigation found. That total – based on federal data collected from states, as well as media reports, lawsuits and public records – is likely a significant undercount since many states only recently began reporting their data, and information on the cases may be incomplete. NBC News found 41 cases that weren’t captured in the data,” the story claims.
Most of the story focuses on those allegedly killed by a handgun that was improperly used — pointed at an innocent person and the trigger pulled.
“In Kansas, a college football player lost his leg after a teammate fired a weapon in 2018 that he thought was unloaded. In Michigan, a pregnant woman was accidentally shot and wounded by her husband, an Army soldier. And earlier this year, a customer inside a crowded Florida gun show was shot in the foot when another man unwittingly fired off a live round,” the story states.
While any firearm-related accident is horrific, the story makes a lot of its numbers, but by comparison, dogs kill nearly three times as many people per year, around 400 die annually from accidental electrocutions, and texting while driving kills thousands more people every year.
And each year, 150 people are killed by falling coconuts throughout the world.
11 fatalities, while all tragic, are statistical noise in a nation of 330 million with 400 million firearms in private hands.
The NSSF’s Larry Keane notes in the above-linked piece that magazine disconnects may well render a gun useless in a life-or-death scenario, meaning that this “life-saving device” might well result in more people being killed.
Plus, as Williams notes, none of this happens if people follow the basic gun-handling safety rules that we all know and love. Treating all guns as if they’re loaded and not pointing them at anything you don’t intend to destroy has a tendency to prevent you from shooting your wife.
Also included was a critique of how the NBC report used data from the Gun Violence Archive.
I’ve had my issues with GVA data and for the same reason Williams does, but even if absolutely none of this was true, a quote from GVA executive director Mark Bryant would be enough. Speaking about how they get their data, Bryant mentioned law enforcement social media pages as well as media reports, saying, “The easiest is to grab media sources. Law enforcement is clinical. The media looks more subjectively at an incident.”
Maybe it’s just me, but subjective data isn’t data, it’s narrative.
What NBC News did on this wasn’t journalism, it’s activism.
If it weren’t, they’d have nixed the story because there are far bigger issues in our nation today than trying to force magazine disconnects on people who don’t want them over what amounts to a trivial number of incidents.
We’re talking about 11 deaths per year here. I’m sure that those who lost someone they cared about feel each as an unspeakable tragedy, it’s still just not enough of a thing to really need to worry, but NBC News clearly feels otherwise.
And that’s the media subjectivity that Bryant prefers but that shouldn’t even exist.
Read the full article here
