As part of ABC’s ongoing propaganda series about gun violence in the United States — “Rethinking Gun Violence” — the liberal media outlet relies heavily on data from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).
Its bias is obvious from the very start. In a recent ABC News piece Ivan Pereira states that “Mass shootings have dominated the headlines, conversations, and political debate around America’s gun violence problem for decades.” That is because the mainstream liberal kept media has made it so.
He errs by claiming that gun violence is “perpetrated in many cases with military-style rifles [which] have become a symbol for … America’s obsession with guns.” This makes America an “anomaly … a wealthy country with an endemic gun violence issue and the seeming inability to solve it.”
As John Stott and others have proven, most gun violence occurs in inner cities run by Democrats, and involves handguns that are readily available in spite of onerous restrictions on gun ownership. Pereira and ABC News ignore this. The “problem” is the gun, and they want to “solve” it.
One way to solve it is to blow that “problem” out of all proportion. So, wrote Pereira, “We developed a Gun Violence Tracker to help illustrate the daily toll of gun violence in America in partnership with the independent, nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA).”
GVA purports to be independent, and therefore utterly reliable. But digging into its history, one finds that GVA grew out of the work of Slate.com’s 2013 study of deaths by gun violence. Slate, of course, is one of the more vociferous opponents of Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.
The effort was taken over by Michael Klein, the founder of the left-leaning Sunlight Foundation.
So much for being independent and free of bias.
From its website, one learns that GVA is an online “archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government, and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near real-time data about the results of gun violence.” Pure of heart, it claims that GVA “is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.”
Of course, its real purpose is to provide “information [that] will inform and assist those engaged in discussions and activities concerning gun violence, including analysis of proposed regulations or legislation … GVA is not, by design, an advocacy group.”
It doesn’t need to be. By providing data useful to groups and agencies bent on ultimately removing lawfully owned firearms from the citizenry, it can claim its purity.
But, as AWR Hawkins points out at Breitbart, “Gun Violence Tracker pads the numbers.” And those numbers come from GVA.
GVA is clear about its bias:
Gun Violence describes the results of all incidents of death or injury or threat with firearms without pejorative judgment within the definition.
Violence is defined without intent or consequence as a consideration.
To that end a shooting of a victim by a subject/suspect is considered gun violence as is a defensive use or an officer involved shooting.
The act itself, no matter the reason is violent in nature.
To be clear, says GVA, if a gun is involved, it is called gun violence. If someone squeezes a trigger, and the incident appears somewhere in the media or the government, it is counted. GVA explains:
Our definition of gun violence is intended to be fully inclusionary of disparate elements of gun related incidents … in that, all types of shootings are included, whether OIS [officer involved shooting], accidental, children shooting themselves, murders, armed robberies, familicide, mass shootings, DGU [defensive gun use], Home Invasions, drivebys and everything else.
Through October 27, GVA reports that there have been 36,786 deaths from all causes. Of those, 19,800 were suicides, or 54 percent. And even that number is suspect. Explains GVA: “Suicides are collected through the CDC and, because of privacy and CDC policy, they are only available as an aggregate number, without detail.”
So, of the alleged 36,786 deaths by gun violence, only 46 percent are listed as “homicide/murder/unintentional/DGU [Defensive Gun Uses].” The takeaway is this: whenever GVA is used as a source for independent, unbiased, reliable data on so-called gun violence, one may be certain that the data is wrong. Flawed data in = flawed conclusions out. Caveat emptor.
