Saint Louis Anti-Gun Editorial an Unhinged Screed with Loose Relationship with Facts

I read a lot of editorials.

By that, I mean those written by a paper’s editorial board. A lot of people think of editorials as the same as op-eds, and they’re not. Op-eds are the thoughts of a single person who writes for the publication. They may or may not represent the values of that publication in what they write. Their opinions are their own, as many op-ed pages note to some degree or another.

Editorial boards craft the official stance of a publication, which is part of why I can honestly tell you that pretty much every major and second-tier news publication in this country that’s not expressly conservative in its direction is anti-gun.

They make it very clear.

And the editorial board at the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch is doing nothing to dissuade me from that opinion with an editorial titled, “Editorial: Guns kill kids more often in Missouri than in most states. It’s not coincidence.”

Guns don’t kill, people kill, goes the popular old trope against rational gun-safety laws. Setting aside that it’s not strictly true (what about accidental discharges of found firearms, which kill hundreds of kids a year?), the trope is always colliding with inconvenient data.

No, it’s not.

In every single instance, the gun did nothing by itself. Someone had to pull the trigger. Even in negligent discharges of “found firearms.” The phrase doesn’t imply that every death by gunfire is intentional. It’s only pointing out that someone pulled that trigger and that is where the fault lies.

However, people like the members of the editorial board continue to try and pretend that the guns are the issue, as if people have absolutely no responsibility in the matter.

If “guns don’t kill, people kill,” how to explain the fact that Americans are statistically far more likely to be killed by guns in states such as Missouri, which has almost no restrictions on adult gun possession, than in states that have substantive restrictions? Are Missourians just worse people than, say, Illinoisans or New Yorkers? We don’t think so; the gun lobby apparently does.

Actually, the gun lobby believes no such thing.

However, the gun control lobby and the editorial board seem to believe that people in Missouri are so psychologically and emotionally weak as to be driven to commit horrible atrocities simply because the tools they can use for that are more readily available in their state than in others.

What else can one surmise from this line of “reasoning” presented here?

The latest inconvenient data comes courtesy of the American Medical Association. In a major new study of pediatric firearms deaths, the AMA charts the clear correlation between states’ gun-safety policies and the rates by which children are killed by guns.

The study in question has massive flaws, as we’ve pointed out previously. Plus, it’s correlation, which doesn’t necessarily mean there’s causation. That’s an important point because we’ve seen the homicide rate go down since Bruen actually forced anti-gun states to stop restricting who can get permits to only a handful of people.

If more guns meant more crime, we should see the opposite, and we don’t.

The short version: Missouri remains a dangerous place to be a kid.

Start with the unacceptable, horrendous, nauseating fact that guns are the leading cause of death today for American children. That’s not the case in any other advanced country. Just us. Firearms take roughly seven young American lives a day, every day. Is it a coincidence that the country with the loosest gun laws, and more guns per capita than anyone else, also buries child victims of firearms at a higher rate than any other country? Or (again) are Americans just worse people?

Actually, they’re not the leading cause of death in children unless you really think legal adults who can buy property, sign contracts, live on their own, start careers, and enlist in the military are still actually children.

In that case, you’ve got other issues.

As for comparing the United States to other countries, what we find out in many cases is that our non-gun homicide rate is higher than most developed nations’ total homicide rates. While we haven’t broken that down by age, my bet is that we’d find that to hold true across the various age demographics.

Why?

Because there’s something we have here that those countries don’t. I can speculate what precisely that is, but it’s an important data point that needs to be mentioned when you start going on about how we’ve got so many more “gun deaths” than these other countries. I mean, yeah, we do, but we have more non-gun murders, too, and that’s something that should be considered.

Throughout the entire screed that outlines the Post-Dispatch’s official position, they’re coming from a position predicated on misinformation, bad research, poor understanding of the statistics, and a host of other fact that they’ve opted to ignore, either because they were too stupid to think to look for themselves or because they knew what they’d find. Or both.