THE DAILY BLADE: Save The Children?
A WaPo op-ed, "Give Us Back Our Gun Law" argues that restricting gun ownership by adults prevents guns from getting into the hands of juveniles, who borrow them from friends and family members or buy them on the black market.
Cathy Lanier acting chief of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, and Vincent Schiraldi, of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, cite gun control laws enacted during 1995 and 1997 in states surrounding D.C. that "choked off black-market sales, while the D.C. ban on guns in the home reduced the ability of youths to borrow guns from family and friends."
The pair notes that from 1995 to 2006, "the number of juveniles charged with homicide in the District fell 86 percent … In 1995, 14 of the 227 people charged with a homicide in the District, or 6 percent, were juveniles. Last year, only two out of 106 people (fewer than 2 percent) charged with homicides in the District were juveniles."
Curiously, Lanier and Schiraldi do not disclose what weapons these juveniles used to commit homicide; the reader is supposed to infer that guns - and not knives or baseball bats or even hands or feet - were used to commit these crimes.
Meanwhile during this period, thousands of adults living in D.C. were the victims of these violent crimes (statistics from The Disaster Center, as reported in the FBI's September 2006 release of the "UCR for Metropolitan Statistical Areas"):
|
Year |
Population |
Murder |
Forcible Rape |
Robbery |
Aggravated Assault |
|
1995 |
554,000 |
360 |
292 |
6,864 |
7,228 |
|
1996 |
543,000 |
397 |
260 |
6,444 |
6,310 |
|
1997 |
529,000 |
301 |
218 |
4,501 |
5,688 |
|
1998 |
523,000 |
260 |
190 |
3,606 |
4,932 |
|
1999 |
519,000 |
241 |
248 |
3,344 |
4,615 |
|
2000 |
572,059 |
239 |
251 |
3,554 |
4,582 |
|
2001 |
573,822 |
231 |
181 |
3,780 |
5,003 |
|
2002 |
569,157 |
264 |
262 |
3,834 |
4,962 |
|
2003 |
557,620 |
249 |
274 |
3,941 |
4,597 |
|
2004 |
554,239 |
198 |
222 |
3,202 |
3,968 |
|
2005 |
550,521 |
195 |
166 |
3,700 |
3,971 |
The Stiletto thinks that Lanier’s and Schiraldi’s concern over a handful of juveniles - who were no doubt already well on their way to a life of crime – is misplaced, when compared to the nearly 3,000 people - mostly adults - who were murdered from 1995 to 2005.
And what about the juveniles who were directly harmed by Washington, D.C.’s gun control laws? The ones whose unarmed parent didn’t stand a fighting chance against his or her murderer.
The Truth – But Not The Whole Truth – About Fake News
In a nearly 4,000 word article in Columbia Journalism Review, Columbia J-school adjunct professor Robert Love contends that fake news "comes at us from every quarter of the media - old and new - not just as satire but disguised as the real thing, secretly paid for by folks who want to remain in the shadows" and concludes, "Some of us … aren’t doing all we can to help readers and viewers know the difference between the fake and the honest take."
Love cites these recent examples of fake news – which, as it turns out, did not originate with Jon Stewart – in his exhaustive review that goes back as far as Roman emperor Constantine!:
The U.S. government’s 2005 initiative to plant "positive news" in Iraqi newspapers, part of a $300 million U.S. effort to sway public opinion about the war. …
Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who was hired on the down low to act as a $240,000 sock puppet for the president’s No Child Left Behind program. …
The Department of Health and Human Services … deceptive video news releases … touting the administration’s Medicare plan. …
Both CNN and The New York Times were used by the U.S. military as unwitting co-conspirators in spreading false information, a tactic known as psychological operations, part of an effort to convince Americans the invasion of Iraq was a necessary piece of the war on terror. …
Doctored pictures from war zones? The Los Angeles Times ran one in 2003, and Reuters ran one last year.
Grassroots organizations with Orwellian names like Project Protect, funded not by conservation-minded voters, but the timber industry? The investigative reporter Paul Thacker brought that one to light, along the way revealing that a Fox News science reporter named Steven Milloy had undisclosed ties to the oil and tobacco industries.
Love himself is guilty of not doing "all he can" to expose fake news. His list has one glaring omission: Dan Rather’s fake National Guard memos scoop.
And speaking of Dan-o, his keynote address at Austin’s SXSW Music/Multimedia Festival included this bit of irony: "The Internet is a tremendous tool for not just news" but for "illumination and opening things up." You’ll recall that it was a bunch of bloggers sitting around in their PJs who questioned the authenticity of the documents within hours of Rather’s bogus report.
In Rather’s opinion, many people have lost faith in journalists, because "what we in journalism need is a spine transplant." No, Dan, what journalists need is an uncompromising commitment to accuracy, objectivity and professional ethics. Then people’s faith will be restored.
re:DC violent crime. A better statistic would be the number of juveniles killed since 1994, rather than the number charged as this may not correlate to any actual drop in youth homicides. Since about 1994 the violent crime rate has plummeted nationally for reasons that include advances in policing techniques, demographics (as the Baby Boomers left the high crime years), and the idea that crime can be prevented, that police can do more than take reports and arrest criminals. If DC gun laws actually took guns off the streets, I would expect to see a drop in the number of arrests for gun possession or gun sale. Absent these, the WaPo could as well note that murders and other violent crimes under a Republican administration are about half what they were under the Democrats and call that a cause as well.
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