XBradTC

Look, if you don’t know a lot about guns, it’s probably a pretty bad idea to write about guns.

Here’s the headline of a Fiscal Times “article” about the Army’s effort to field a replacement for its sidearm, the 9mm M9:

The Army’s New Handgun: A Weapon for Criminals?

Maureen Mackey goes on to say quote from an article in The Atlantic:

At issue, though, is that “the last time the military challenged the industry to make a better handgun, all the innovations intended for the battlefield also ended up in the consumer market, and the severity of civilian shootings soared,” writes Matt Valentine in The Atlantic. He explains:

Studying gunshot injuries in the D.C. area in the 1980s, Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University noticed an alarming trend – as time went on, more and more patients were arriving at the emergency room with multiple bullet wounds. In 1983, at the beginning of the study period, only about a quarter of gunshot patients had multiple injuries, but in the last two years of the study, that proportion had risen to 43 percent.
Over the same period, semiautomatic pistols with a capacity of 15-rounds (or more) were replacing six-shot revolvers as the most popular firearms in the country. It’s not difficult to see the correlation – more bullets in the guns, more bullets in the victims.

There’s two obvious problems with conflating the incidence of multiple GSW with the Army adoption of the M9.

First, the M9 wasn’t some radical new technology. It was an off the shelf purchase of an existing, in production pistol. Indeed, the general trend at the time was a shift away from revolvers toward semi-automatic pistols, particularly 9mm semis with a capacity of 15 rounds or so. That trend wasn’t just the military, but also among the civilian population, and quite a few police departments.

The second obvious causal factor, as pointed out in the comments of the post, was that 1983 was also the year crack cocaine became the drug of choice, with a corresponding increase in gun violence, particularly among gang members who entered into the lucrative trade. More especially, the same commentor noted that the study Mackey linked even admits this in the abstract of the study:

Temporal changes in admission rates and wound profiles were consistent with the city’s epidemic of drug-related violence and with a shift in weaponry toward high-capacity, semiautomatic handguns.

Agenda journalism wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t always so bad.