When it comes to people saying things that I know to be wrong, I tend to assume the mistake was made in good faith. I don’t want to say people are lying just because they’re wrong. There’s a difference between the two, and it’s an important one. To lie, one has to be aware of the truth and choose to say something they know to be false.
If they’re unaware of the truth, it’s not a lie. They’re just wrong.
If they don’t believe the truth, it’s not a lie. They’re just wrong. Very wrong.
But a student editorial from one publication titled, “Another year, another failure on gun control,” irked me enough in and of itself, but the fact that the student in question seems to be either willfully ignoring facts or just hoping you won’t know the truth makes it clear that the mainstream media isn’t shaping up to improve if this is what schools are churning out.
The United States cannot afford another year of inaction on gun control. The evidence is overwhelming, the tragedies relentless, and the public’s demand for reform undeniable.
Yet year after year, lawmakers fail to act, and families pay the price.
As the holiday season returns, so does a familiar and devastating pattern.
The United States once again faces the grim and familiar reality of gun violence stealing lives during what should be a season of joy, family and celebration. Instead of laughter and light, too many families are left trying to piece together the remains of broken homes and shattered communities.
On Dec. 1, a shooting at a children’s birthday party in Stockton, California left four people dead—three of them children—and 11 more injured. Balloons, cake, and gifts were replaced by police tape, sirens, and grief.
“Tragedy of this nature is unthinkable,” District Attorney Ron Freitas told reporters at the scene. “Violence of this nature has absolutely no place at any time, shape or form—and children should not be harmed by gun and gang violence.”
Yet the Stockton shooting was not an isolated event.
Just days earlier of the Stockton shooting, on Nov. 28, Black Friday shoppers at Westfield Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara, California, fled in panic when gunfire erupted, injuring three people.
Now, so far, what we’ve got isn’t the worst thing in the world. Yes, the author, Emily Astudillo, is citing incidents as if they’re part of some deeper pattern, but those incidents did at least happen. To be honest, I’ve wondered how long it would be until we had some kind of mass attack on Black Friday. The fact that this only resulted in three injuries is a blessing because it should have been much worse.
But there are problems here that Astudillo ignored.
For example, she’s saying we’ve dropped the ball on gun control, yet ignores that these both happened in California, the most gun-controlled state in the nation.
Further, the DA in Stockton called that incident gang violence. That means people who likely couldn’t or wouldn’t get a firearm lawfully. That means they probably went outside of the legal market in some way to get a firearm, and gun control laws cannot stop people who won’t follow the law. It just can’t happen.
But so far, this is an omission that doesn’t rise to the level of lying, at least in my mind.
No, that comes later.
The U.S. continues to stand apart from other developed nations in its tolerance for widespread gun ownership with minimal regulation.
Stronger background checks, closing loopholes in private firearm sales, and restrictions on high-capacity weapons are not radical ideas—they are common-sense measures supported by most Americans.
Countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia enforce strict licensing and background checks, resulting in gun homicide rates far below America’s. The U.S. has nearly 120 civilian-owned guns per 100 residents as well, far more than any other nation.
As a result, tens of thousands of lives are lost to gun violence each year.
The Gun Violence Archive recorded more than 11,000 shooting deaths through September 2025, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the United States experiences one firearm-related death every 11 minutes.
Now, I’m sure she’s unaware that the United States’ non-gun homicide rate is greater than many of those other nations’ total homicide rates, thus suggesting that the issue is something beyond just a lack of gun laws. I’ve reported it, of course, and I repeat that fact at every opportunity I can find, but few others seem to be repeating it, and practically none in the mainstream media.
I’ll give her a pass on that one.
However, she doesn’t get a pass for what she presents from the Gun Violence Archive.
See, that link takes you to an image of the sidebar of the main page at GVA. Had she just included a link to the main page, readers who click the link would see that while the data itself is probably accurate enough for the time period she’s talking about, because we’re well into the last month of the year, we’re actually trending downward compared to the last five years.
Mass shootings, as GVA defines them, are down to their lowest point since 2018. Total homicides are looking to be down to about the same level as they were in 2015. In fact, across the board, everything is looking to be back to at least pre-pandemic levels, all without any significant new gun control that would account for it.
Strange, isn’t it?
See, because our intrepid student columnist included a link that takes the GVA’s totals for this year and removes them from the potential comparison to previous years, it’s kind of hard to look at it and not think this was both intentional and malicious. After all, if it had just been a link to the GVA’s main page, I could probably accept it as being something else.
She didn’t, so what else can I assume?
It seems pretty clear that journalism schools are churning out the next generation of anti-gun propagandists and making sure they know how to misrepresent the truth in such a way that it can only be called lying.
Not that I’m surprised by this fact.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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