Surprising news...

Actually, its more surprising that they covered it...

I was looking at a news story from two days ago.  A school district in Michigan decided to cancel class and lay off all staff since they ran out of money.  This is tragic for the students and the staff.  Everybody is trying to actually do the right thing, from the board to the teachers to the union.  I wanted to comment on this, tying it into a valid comment on the state of affair in our country that this can happen.  However, I got nothing.

Then, I see a news story that I find interesting.  Apparently, gun crime is at it's lowest in 20 years.  More entertainingly, I found the story first at the BBC (of all places).  I then later saw it at Fox and AP, both running it as a page two column three item.  Finally I see it pop up at CNN.

Two reports, one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and one by the Pew Research Center show that the firearm related homicides are down 49%, while other firearm related crimes are all down by over 70%.  Oh my, that does put a bit of a bee in Senator Feinstien's bonnet...

The numbers are amazing when you consider the headlines.  According to all of these news sources over the past several years, the streets are running with blood...  Oh, wait, that hasn't been happening.  Despite grand predictions by the press and gun control advocates, despite the huge headlines run when something does happen outside of Chicago and Detroit... and Oakland, and LA... Despite that, the facts are that firearm violence and homicides are down drastically, dropping consistently over the past 20 years.  And that is despite the firearm sales initiatives (un)officially inspired by both Clinton and Obama.  Especially Obama, firearm salesman of the year 5 years running.

Now that all of the gun control advocates have these reports to stick in their pipes to smoke, maybe we can get on with fixing the items that actually need fixing, like out bankrupt cities, schools, crumbling infrastructure, porous borders and bloated federal government.  If the press would like to complain about gun violence, maybe they should start covering all of the gang shootings in the cities mentioned above and putting the spotlight on the criminal, not the tool.