Hack WaPo “Fact-Checker” Uses Bad Data to Dismiss “Good Guy With a Gun” Hypothesis

In a presupposed “fact-check” Tuesday Washington Post Editor “fact checker” Glenn Kessler wrote an analysis that addressed the widely held belief that a good guy can have a gun and a bad guy can’t have a gun. The article, however, is titled “What’s more common: A ‘good guy’ without a gun — or with one?”He argued that the data was incomplete and inconsistent and muddy the waters.

This analysis started with quotes contrasting the helpfulness of having armed, good men available to stop mass shootings. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican senator, was the first to quote. “What inevitably stops these horrific crimes: Armed good guys stopping armed bad guys.” The second came from Richard Fierro who was a patron and took on the shooter at Club Q, Colorado Springs. “Having a gunfight is not going to help anybody.”

Kessler’s premise was flawed from the beginning; he narrows the cases to just mass shootings and limits who classifies as a good guy with a gun. Suggestion “neither is the norm,” he explains that he’ll be relying on the FBI’s data for this analysis, which he admits excludes armed intervention from security and police personnel (A.K.A good guys with guns):

Whether one is more common than the other depends on the data you use — though among all such shooting attacks, neither is the norm. The majority of shooting attacks are more than 430. “active-shooter” Recorded incidents [sic] Since 2000, the FBI has been tracking the shootings and providing information. The shooter was killed or arrested by law enforcement or the shooting victim committed suicide.

Examining numbers from Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT), which helps populate the FBI’s figures, Kessler notes:

These data show that citizens who don’t have guns have stopped nearly twice as many incidents (42%) than citizens who had guns and were not commissioned officers of law enforcement (22). The number of people with guns drops to 12 if security personnel and off-duty officers are not included in the list.

Kessler mentions John R. Lott Jr. gun rights researcher, who had compiled the information. His own list “of more than 100 instances between 2014 and 2021, linked to news reports, when a citizen with a lawful firearm ended an active-shooting situation.”

Kessler, however, casts doubt on the validity of this assertion: “Lott has his own bias. He keeps track only of the active-shooter incidents that someone with a weapon has ended. So a list including instances when a person without a firearm ended the shooting could also be higher.”

The remainder of the article examines the discrepancies among the lists, as well as conflicting arguments about which cases are mass shootings. Kessler finally gives up:

It is a difficult decision to decide what active-shooter incidents should be included. But it’s worth remembering that the FBI does not claim that its database is comprehensive, making it difficult to make an easy determination about whether good guys with guns or good guys without guns are more common.

A wealth of research and writings have shown that firearms can be used to defend against criminals.

A Georgetown University Study This publication was published in 2022 “approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.”

Kessler was responded to by Steve Guest, Special Advisor in Communications for Senator Cruz. He called out the fact checker for failing to reach out to the Senator’s office before publication. Guest also referenced research from Heritage Foundation They compiled the results from major gun studies and determined “Americans use their guns in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times a year.”

@GlennKesslerWPIs it too hard for WAPO to reach you prior to publication? I would have loved to do the research!

Flagging – If the data/research doesn’t support the narrative you are trying to spread about Sen. Ted Cruz, and the Second Amendment, it is flagged.

Geppetto checkmark please:

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 31, 2023

Kessler’s limitation of only counting defensive uses when intervening in mass shootings makes all these other cases, where lives could be on the line, count for nothing.

Kessler should not be fact-checking the effectiveness and good guys with guns. Instead, he should be looking at the exaggerated mass shooting figures that Gun Violence Archive (GVA), along with the liberal media. The Washington Post.

These two years have seen a significant increase in the number of people who own their homes. NewsBusters Has Several times debunked GVA’s false narrative.