And Now a Word from Captain Obvious

If you spend as much time as I do looking for story fodder, there are certain types of “reporting” that are going to get on your nerves after a while. Wildly over-dramatic headlines are annoying, especially when the story is of no particular interest to anyone. Stories that bring up issues resolved years ago, crises for which suitable solutions were implemented in the last century or horrible cultural insults that no one even noticed, let alone protested, are just wastes of everybody’s time and bandwidth. And stories that attempt to create an issue where none exists – or, indeed, ever could – are just a huge nuisance all around. The best thing you can say for most of this flotsam cluttering up the Internet is that we aren’t killing and grinding up any more trees to print it on. But every once in a while, a story hits that combines two or more of these problems into a complete morass of suck…

Take, for example, a recent Rolling Stone online article about “The 5 Most Dangerous Guns in America.” This sounds like it could be a controversial but hard-hitting look at the gun types and models that are used in the largest number of crimes, the ones that are the most easily obtained and/or stolen, the ones that can be most easily modified for various sinister purposes, the ones that are the hardest to detect and therefore the greatest threats to public safety, the ones most often used in workplace shootings, the ones most often used in school shootings, the ones most often used in drive-by shootings, or even the ones that are most likely to fail in spectacular ways and kill the person wielding, cleaning, or standing in front of them. Unfortunately, that would require research, interviews and analysis – what used to be called “journalism” back when people still did any of those things…

Instead, this “article” lists just five categories of guns: pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns and derringers. Throughout the six pages, the author uses FBI and BATF data to present the total number of each gun type recovered at crime scenes in 2012, all of which tells us exactly nothing. Consider, for example, that according to the ATF something over 119,000 automatic pistols were found at crime scenes in 2012. That would include non-violent crimes, misdemeanors like trespassing and jaywalking, and suicides (in most municipalities suicide is a crime as well as a tragedy); it also gives us no idea of the relative safety or lethality of these weapons or how many of these “crimes” were eventually dismissed as self-defense. And while the raw number may sound like a lot, 119,000 isn’t actually a particularly impressive fraction of the 150 million to 200 million handguns estimated to exist in the United States alone…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that this story would have been controversial no matter what happened. The fact is that any gun can be deadly if the person firing it can hit the target, and the most dangerous gun in almost any situation is the one being held by a person who does not know how to use it safely. But the worst part of this type of reporting is that it replaces any opportunity for meaningful dialog about gun-related violence with nonsensical scare-mongering. Those five types of gun represent almost every kind of firearm normally available to the general public (black powder weapons and specialty types not withstanding); one might just as well say that most traffic accidents are caused by cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles, vans and buses (including RV types). In other words, it’s a statement so self-evident and meaningless that even Captain Obvious himself would hesitate to bring it up…

I don’t have any easy answers for the ongoing gun control debate; I don’t believe there are any. And even if I did, I don’t believe a blog about business and management topics would be the right place to air them. I’m just saying that if I owned any news source in any medium I would fire anybody who approved this sort of blather for publication – and then I’d assign the reporter to do some actual research for a change...