Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Nocera, in the NY Times, invents his own statistics (sounds like CeaseFirePA) "It has been a year since my assistant, Jennifer Mascia , and I started publishing The Gun Report , an effort to use my blog to aggregate daily gun violence in America. Our methodology is pretty simple: We do a Google News search each weekday morning for the previous day's shootings and then list them. Most days, we have been finding between 20 and 30 shootings; on Mondays, when we also add the weekend's violence, the number is usually well over 100."
FOAC Chairman replies:
"The column in the 2/10 edition by Joe Nocera titled "Gun report kills myths" does no such thing as far as guns are concerned.
Nocera runs a blog titled The Gun Report via which he tracks (select) gun related incidents as reported in various publications nationwide. Even then Nocera admits that he knows he is missing a lot more incidents than he reports, just not in the way he wishes his audience to believe.
He notes that his sources are not reporting all suicides (which anti gun activists use to bolster their figures and mislead the public who equate gun control with crime control)) so the actual number of gun related deaths is probably higher, yet he gives no basis for his assertion.
Later he admits that comprehensiveness (i.e. completeness) was never really the point. No, why let something like facts and reliable data get in the way of his agenda? The same applies to his opinion, presented as fact, that "The NRA shibboleth that having a gun in one's house makes you safer is demonstrably untrue."
Nocera attempts to deflect accusations that his blog is lax in citing incidents where guns have been used to deter crime and save lives. His argument is that such incidents are lacking, as they are not often reported in the media. The same as the lack of reports about gun related suicides?
The reason many, if not most self-defense incidents are not reported often falls under one of three scenarios.
The gun owner did not report it to law enforcement, as they did not see the necessity or use.
The gun owner did not report it as they feared being arrested themself, often on a bogus or technical charge many of which do not stand up to scrutiny and are dismissed. Such actions are quite common and I see reports of them almost daily, yet Nocera seems to somehow miss them in his net.
The media simply failed to report the incident for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is anti gun bias.
The facts, as supported by various studies, are that guns save far more lives than they take by whatever means annually.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/opinion/nocera-the-gun-report-1-year-later.html