More dishonest reporting on the gun issue

At this point I think we have to assume these journalists are doing this intentionally, it just happens too often.

See if you can follow the tortured logic this reporter uses in a desperate attempt to make his facts fit the accepted narrative, that evil US gun smugglers are fueling drug-related gun battles all across the Western Hemisphere.

The opening paragraph lets us know what the reporter is going to try and show us.

"KINGSTON, Jamaica – Ships from Miami steam into Jamaica's main harbor loaded with TV sets and blue jeans. But some of the most popular U.S. imports never appear on the manifests: handguns, rifles and bullets that stoke one of the world's highest murder rates."

But of course you just know that if you read the piece with a discerning eye, he's not going to prove anything of the sort. That's why I clicked on the headline when I logged on to Yahoo this morning.

Check this out...

"Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year. But of those whose origin can be traced, 80 percent come from the U.S., Jamaican law enforcement officials have said in interviews with The Associated Press."

Isn't there a crucial piece of information missing from this sentence? Isn't it a piece of information without which, you can't possibly make the assertion the reporter makes in his opening paragraph?

"Of those whose origin can be traced."

Well how many is that? What if they can only trace the origin of 10? That would mean only 8 guns a year come from the United States. And if that's the number, it hardly seems worth an entire AP article. Now maybe it's more than 10, but the article doesn't say, and so we don't know. It's at least as likely that the number is 10 as it is that the number is all 1,000 isn't it?

And while we're at it... what about that 1,000 number. I'm getting that number from this sentence.

"The volume is much less than the flow of U.S. guns into Mexico that end up in the hands of drug cartels — Jamaican authorities recover fewer than 1,000 firearms a year."

If you say "fewer than 1,000" I think it's fair to assume that the actual number is something like 9,467. And the reporter HAS to know that this is exactly what his readers will assume. But you have to read four paragraphs deeper into the piece to get to this sentence.

"But they have a long way to go. Jamaican authorities have confiscated only 100 guns coming into ports in the last five years, along with 6,000 rounds of ammunition. That in turn is just a fraction of the 700 or so weapons confiscated on the streets each year."

So while it's technically correct that 700 is "fewer than 1,000", it's also true that 700 is a lot closer to 500 than it is to 1,000. That's one hell of an exaggeration, no? The reporter ignore a 30% error between what the actual number is, and what he wishes it was, the much scarier figure of 1,000, and just prints the scary number... even though he reveals it to be false later on in the same damned piece.

Increasing gun control measures is serious business. If you want to support the idea that US gun owners and sellers should be subjected to increased regulation an surveillance, that's fine. It's a free country. But this is one of those issues where you owe it to the world to make your argument with accurate facts backing them up. And to use a powerful platform like the AP to flat-out lie about the issue does more harm to your argument than good.

I don't know who Mike Melia is, but this is shamefully biased reporting, and he should be ashamed of himself.