Accessories To Lying

The Lügenpresse works full time to keep the normies ill-informed and misinformed, distracted by flashing lights and shiny baubles while carefully emphasizing some news while ignoring other news. It is a big job and more than the dimwits who work in media and journalism can handle on their own in a world where information can be shared around the world instantly. Often they enlist other parties to aid and abet their lying. You know the big ones, like the ADL, the SPLC and the ACLU. Another one that has gained prominence in recent years is one I am very familiar with and reference periodically: the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

GVA is widely cited among the media and even used as a source for Supreme Court justices, particularly when talking about “mass shootings”. The media loves to trumpet the latest milestone of gunfire, marking the 100th, 200th, 300th and recently the 400th mass shooting in America. Because of the selective coverage of the media, most Americans, in fact probably all but a handful, believe that all mass shootings are the kind that get the most attention: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland, Las Vegas. Those mass casualty events are relatively rare but change the focus and declare 4 or more people shot to be a mass shooting and suddenly those numbers skyrocket.

A lot of 2A guys get upset at the GVA’s definition of mass shootings as “4 or more people shot, not counting the shooter” and try to argue that the definition is wrong (ex Lee Williams, who writes on Substack and does good work so you should follow him, published this a couple of years ago: Special Report: The Gun Violence Archive and its scaring of America). I have often asserted this is the wrong way to go about it. When you argue with the media about using the GVA’s definition you are on the backfoot and wasting your time, because the media doesn’t care about “fighting fair”. My tactic is to turn that around and ask about demographics of those shootings and why we hear so little about the specifics. More on that in a moment.

GVA boasts of a “dedicated, professional staff” but what I didn’t find on their website is any mention of who is funding the GVA. Since founder Michael Klein is a big proponent of transparency at the government level, it makes me wonder why that information isn’t provided. I did find it with a little searching, in an article from 2017 at the Toronto Star of all places: Website counts the bodies as they fall to gunfire across America. The article is focused on Mark Bryant who is the public face of GVA and is always pictured as a smiling Wilford Brimley looking fella, like this photo from CNN:

Bryant is intended to appear disarming (pun intended). He is just an old retired guy on his computer in Kentucky, a gun owner no less who allegedly sold some handguns to pay for the start-up costs of the GVA. It is a clever tactic, and Mark Bryant is the perfect public face. He might do the work but Michael (Mike) Klein is the man paying the bills. From the linked Toronto Star article:

GVA’s budget of about $500,000 (U.S.) a year comes from Michael Klein of Washington, who made a fortune in commercial real estate and corporate law before backing a number of non-profits that interest him.

Klein is an 80+ year old guy with lots of money to burn and an aversion to the spotlight. While the GVA claims that they don’t take positions and just provide data, Michael Kline’s profile paints a picture of a left-wing activist, funding not just GVA but also the Global Warming Mitigation Project that hands out money to scientists who support the idea of “global warming” and he was a member of the Board of Directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. I’ll go on a limb and assume he voted for Hillary. That tells me that while they claim to be just providing information, their intent is the same as the rest of the gun control Left: disarming the general population and in particular Whites.

In turn that brings us to the quiet shift in the media to adopt the GVA’s definition of mass shootings. It might not be stated overtly but it is pretty obvious that the GVA exists to provide fodder for the gun grabbing Left. By adopting a definition of mass shootings that goes far beyond Las Vegas, Aurora or Columbine, the intent is clear: scaring the normies in the political middle, and especially suburban White women, into supporting more gun control. If there really have been 400 mass shootings this year, then that means that anyone anywhere is in danger of being caught up in one. Many normies are absolutely convinced that unstable White incels are gunning people down on a daily basis.

The problem?

That isn’t true. Not at all.

This is well trod ground here at Dissident Thoughts so I won’t rehash all of it. Suffice it to say that the prototypical White, young male incel, probably on psychotropic meds, likely with a Hitler fetish or general racist ideology, is a very rare beast indeed. Instead, what I have found by watching the mass shooting news reports for years and reinforced even by leftist media when they let it slip, is that the mass shooting phenomena as defined by the GVA is almost entirely confined to the black community with the mestizo population starting to join in.

That has the potential of putting the GVA in something of a jam, if you call them out on it. For an organization devoted to studying gun violence, being data focused and getting lots of attention on the mass shooting topic, they avoid looking at the actual shooters like Joe Biden avoids girls that are past pre-adolescent age. They only count incidents and pretend the guns just went off by themselves. If they did report on the race of the shooters it would become apparent that we don’t have a “gun violence” problem as such, but we have a “subset of one racial group violence” problem.

The other day I poked at them on Facebook a little, I already posted one screenshot from GVA in a prior post but here it is again.

They responded back to me and asserted that 50% of mass shootings were committed by White people with all other races making up the other 50%. I of course expressed an interest in seeing where they were getting that figure, as that would imply that over 200 mass shootings were committed by Whites just in 2023. If that were true, you can be sure you would have heard about it. I suspect they realized that they were on perilous ground….

Sadly before they could fall for my plot and also before I screenshot their initial reply, I got this reply….

I am guessing they meant “implication” but even that is insulting as I was not implying anything, I was coming right out and saying that blacks commit most mass shootings. Anyhoo, this is the pinned post referred to in their reply after deleting my comments and the back and forth with some pedo looking dude who was walking into the same trap.

That is what we call carefully controlling the narrative. Most of their posts get very little interaction at all, a couple of sad or angry reacts but almost no comments. They don’t want comments because people might ask inconvenient questions like mine, questions that are completely pertinent to the gun violence debate and questions that have answers if you bother to look.

The reason I was salivating like a lion watching a limping wildebeest is that I knew exactly where the person replying to me with the “Whites commit 50% of mass shootings” came up with that. I have gotten it a bunch of times from people on social media and it invariably comes from a Google search like this “Do White people commit most mass shootings” and the answer usually sends them to the same Newsweek story:

There you have it, it says right there in black and white: White men have committed more mass shootings than any other group. Case closed! Or is it? As Lee Corso is so fond of saying…

I dealt with this in some detail in a prior post: How Do We Reduce Black Crime Statistics? Stop Counting Black Crimes!, you should read the whole thing, but I will give you the CliffsNotes version.

Newsweek claims that 54% of mass shootings since 1982 have been committed by Whites, mostly men. Most people stop reading there but if you take a couple of extra clicks, you will find that Newsweek is relying entirely a different story from far Left Mother Jones. The rest of the Newsweek story delves into explaining that White men commit mass shootings because of a “sense of entitlement”, whatever the hell that means, while relying on their link to Mother Jones. However if you read the Mother Jones story, you find something very interesting.

First thing, they use the “four or more killed” criteria which as I mentioned tends to under-report black shooters, although they modified this for shootings after 2013 to include three or more killed. Then they exclude gang shootings. Well hell, that is sure to give you the result you are looking for! Just take out conventional criminal shootings to focus only on specific types of mass shootings that oh by the way also happens to wildly over-represent white shooters. Since a lot of black mass shooters have a prior criminal record and/or gang affiliations, you simply don’t count those and the percentages go way down but even doing that you still find that blacks are over-represented and whites are under-represented based on their per capita population.

Pretty sneaky! To get the result you want, you simply don’t count the shootings you don’t want to count.

This leaves GVA in a quandary. They want to tell you that there have been over 400 mass shootings in 2023 because that gets them quoted in the news but if pressed on the racial demographics they would be forced to admit that blacks commit most mass shootings, or on the other hand if they use the 54% of mass shooters are White as asserted by Mother Jones, then the sample size goes from over 400 this year to only 145 mass shootings over the course of 40 years! Just over three and half mass shootings on average per year isn’t going to get you quoted by the New York Times….

You can see now why the Gun Violence Archive tightly polices comments on their Facebook page, otherwise they have to admit that either…

A) They are wildly exaggerating the number of mass shootings.

-or-

B) They must admit that most mass shootings are committed by blacks.

This is lying by omission but that is what makes them a useful accomplice for the Lügenpresse. The media relies on lies, omissions and deflections to keep people uninformed or misinformed. When you see someone on social media quoting the Gun Violence Archive, now you know that the information they are providing is technically accurate but intentionally incomplete, and that is no different than outright lying

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