Math-Illiterate AP Gun Story

The Associated Press just put out a press-release generated story about the supposed nexus between states with lax gun laws and exports of those guns for crimes.

There’s nothing necessarily bad about such stories — I’ve written many myself — as long as the reporter takes a critical look at the information to see if it has any flaws. Unfortunately, there are glaring flaws, and the AP didn’t mention them in the story. Here’s a look at those flaws. The story begins:

WASHINGTON — Nearly half of the guns that crossed state lines and were used in crimes in 2009 were sold in just 10 states, according to a report being released Monday by a mayors’ group. . .

Forty-nine percent of those guns were sold in Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, California or Arizona.

Here is the entire report, in PDF, 2.5 megabytes.

The first question that occurred to me was, is this number disproportionate according to the 10 states’ share of the U.S. population? The AP story doesn’t say, so I used Google to find U.S. Census data. As of the middle of last year, the U.S. had 307 million people. The 10 states had a combined population of 144.2 million. Of the U.S. population, that’s a shade under 47 percent. So the population discrepancy is on the order of 2 percentage points, hardly worthy of mention.

The report itself cautioned about this particular error, stating:

The figures above report the raw numbers of crime guns that cross state lines and are recovered in the United States, but raw numbers do not tell the whole story. States with larger populations can be expected to be a source of more crime guns. Therefore, to more precisely identify the states that are disproportionately large suppliers of interstate crime guns, this report controls for state population.

Despite this caution, the innumerate AP story used this bogus statistic in its lead.

In addition, the AP story doesn’t say what percentage of guns not involved in crimes were exported. Perhaps they have a high score in that category as well. This would be utterly unsurprising, considering that states with restrictive gun laws do less exporting.

The AP story also said:

States were also ranked by the number of crime guns exported per 100,000 inhabitants. Mississippi led that list, followed by West Virginia, Kentucky, Alaska, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Nevada and Georgia.

Those states, the report said, have more relaxed gun laws, suggesting that “criminals and gun traffickers may favor certain states as the sources of guns.”

For example, in states that do not require background checks for handgun sales at gun shows, the crime-gun export rate was two-and-a-half times as much as the rate in states that do require such checks.

Again, the AP story doesn’t say how the states fared in the proportion of non-crime guns exported. The full report also fails to tackle those issues.

Moreover, the report itself cautions of other inadequacies. Not all guns used in crime can be traced, and not all crime guns are recovered. Neither of those facts appear in the AP story.

It would be easy to argue this another way, by looking at the amount of guns used to legitimately defend people against criminals. Apparently, this isn’t important to those releasing the report, because that stat is nowhere in it.

Also of note, the higher crime rate in areas that have strict controls on guns, such as Washington, DC. The states that export the guns also have more permissive rules for their own people. And they somehow seem immune to the supposedly crime-breeding effect of easily available guns. That would seem to argue for DC and other areas to ease up on their restrictive gun laws, so law-abiding citizens can be armed against the criminals.

A balanced report would look at all the data, pro and con, but this report is from an anti-gun group. A journalist is supposed to know enough to provide the balance advocacy groups lack. Either the poor pixilated AP reporter was too overworked or lazy to go the extra mile, or is so anti-gun that balance didn’t seem important.

Critical fact-checking when given information by an advocacy group is Journalism 101. In this as in many other instances, the AP has failed to meet even that elementary standard of basic accuracy.

I’d like to name the innumerate reporter who wrote this propaganda piece for the anti-gun lobby, but it doesn’t appear on the story. Considering its bad journalism, that’s not at all surprising.

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This is my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.