Thomas Sowell: News Versus Propaganda Vis-à-Vis Gun Control

By Thomas Sowell

7/24/2012

Too many people in the m edia cannot seem to tell the difference between reporting the news and creating propaganda.

NBC
News apparently could not resist doctoring the transcript of the
conversation between George Zimmerman and the police after the Trayvon
Martin shooting. Now ABC News took the fact that the man arrested for
the shooting in Colorado was named James Holmes to broadcast to the
world the fact that there is a James Holmes who is a member of the Tea
Party in Colorado.

The fact has since come out that these are two
different men, one in his 20s and the other in his 50s. But corrections
never catch up with irresponsible news broadcasts. The James Holmes who
belongs to the Tea Party has been deluged with phone calls. I hope he
sues ABC News for every dime they have.

This is not the first time
that the mainstream media have tried to create a link between
conservatives and violence. Years ago, the Oklahoma City bombing was
blamed on Rush Limbaugh, despite the absence of any evidence that the
bomber was inspired by Rush Limbaugh.

Similar things have
happened repeatedly, going all the way back to the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, which was blamed on a hostile right-wing
atmosphere in Dallas, even though the assassin had a long history of
being on the far left fringe.

But, where the shoe is on the other
foot -- as when the Unabomber had a much marked-up copy of an
environmentalist book by Al Gore -- the media heard no evil, saw no evil
and spoke no evil. If people in the media cannot decide whether they
are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is
all the more important that the public understand that difference, and
choose their news sources accordingly.

As for gun control
advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the
slightest dent in their thinking -- or lack of thinking. New York's
Mayor Bloomberg and CNN's Piers Morgan were on the air within hours of
the shooting, pushing the case for gun control laws.

You might
never know, from what they and other gun control advocates have said,
that there is a mountain of evidence that gun control laws not only fail
to control guns but are often counterproductive. However, for those
other people who still think facts matter, it is worth presenting some
of those facts.[See, e.g., "More Guns, Less
Crime"by John Lott, which uses statistics to show that violent crime
rates go down when states pass less stringent "shall issue" concealed
carry laws.]

Do countries with strong gun control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data.

Britain
is a country with stronger gun control laws than the United States, and
lower murder rates. But Mexico, Russia and Brazil are also countries
with stronger gun control laws than the United States -- and their
murder rates are much higher than ours. Israel and Switzerland have even
higher rates of gun ownership than the United States, and much lower
murder rates than ours.

Even the British example does not stand up
very well under scrutiny. The murder rate in New York has been several
times that in London for more than two centuries -- and, for most of
that time, neither place had strong gun control laws. New York had
strong gun control laws years before London did, but New York still had
several times the murder rate of London.

It was in the later
decades of the 20th century that the British government clamped down
with severe gun control laws, disarming virtually the entire law-abiding
citizenry. Gun crimes, including murder, rose as the public was
disarmed.

Meanwhile, murder rates in the United States declined
during the same years when murder rates in Britain were rising, which
were also years when Americans were buying millions more guns per year.

The
real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions
of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to
allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of
superiority that those beliefs give them.

Any discussion of facts is futile when directed at such people. All anyone can do is warn others about the propaganda.

Thomas Sowell