Grading PolitiFact: Frank Lautenberg and murders or guns or something (Updated)

Those of us on the right have watched with a combination of amusement and anger as many figures on the left have tried to politicize the attack on Rep. Gabriella Giffords that left nine dead and Giffords critically wounded.  The initial attempt to politicize the event painted the gunman's attack as the result of heightened political rhetoric from (where else?) the right.  People aren't buying that, so the next best thing is to use the event to push for gun control.  And PolitiFact was there.

Fortunately, PolitiFact changed its usual practice and had both the writer and the editor of the story publicly announce their positions on gun control prior to publishing the story.

Just kidding.

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact adequately provides the setting:

One of the lawmakers who made the case for tightening gun laws was Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. In an interview on MSNBC on Jan. 11, 2011. Lautenberg -- who is preparing legislation to ban high-capacity gun clips like the ones used in the Tucson attack -- said, "But the fact of the matter is, when we look at the number of murders in the United States, 2009, we had 9,500 people murdered. When we look around the world, we see large companies -- large countries, the U.K., Germany, Japan had 200 or less killed in a year."

The wider context of Lautenberg's statement shows that PolitiFact is hiding Lautenberg's underlying argument--that is, the justification he's giving for tightening gun laws:

QUESTION: All right. Well, let`s say that the -- the cartridges had remained banned, that you would not be able to carry 33 rounds in one extended magazine. Ten rounds is still enough to kill the same amount of victims that we have here, the people who died in the shooting on Saturday.So why is that clip the focus of your energy and your attention now?

LAUTENBERG: Well, because it`s the one thing that, obviously, permitted this madman to hit so many people in such a short period of time. And thank goodness we had some heroic actions that interrupted his ability to put in another magazine. Otherwise we`d have seen a greater loss. But the fact of the matter is, when we look at the number of murders in the United States, 2009, we had 9,500 people murdered. When we look around the world, we see large companies -- large countries, the U.K., Germany, Japan had 200 or less killed in a year. And we`re at 9,500. There`s got to be a reason for that. We don`t have more madmen, but we have more guns.

QUESTION: Why is this magazine your focus and not mental health?

To me, it should go without saying that a cherry-picked comparison of firearm murder rates between the United States and three other nations--two of which might as well be living on an island--is not the basis for a good argument.  PolitiFact apparently chooses its battles when it comes to that sort of thing.

Back to the fact checking:

We wondered whether Lautenberg's statistics were correct. First, we'll look at the statistics for the U.S. (Lautenberg said "murders," but the full context of the interview clarifies that he actually meant to say murders by guns.)

Begging to differ, but I found nothing at all in the "full context of the interview" that clarifies that Lautenberg actually meant to say murders by guns.  His statement makes good sense the way he said it until one starts looking into the numbers outside the context of the interview.  Japan, for example, experienced well over 200 murders in 2009 but under 200 through the use of firearms.

It's appropriate to offer Lautenberg the benefit of the doubt over what he meant based on numbers from outside the context.  But it's not appropriate to pretend that the context of the interview itself accounts for that granting of the benefit of the doubt.  The latter is PolitiSpin.

On to the statistics, with PolitiFact as our guide:

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 2009, there were 10,224 homicides in the U.S. that involved a gun. So by this count, Lautenberg's number was actually a little low.

Whoa, there, Nelly.

Homicides involving a gun are not necessarily murders.  Lautenberg specified murders.  It's not right to count, for example, manslaughter or justifiable homicide as a murder.  PolitiFact, oddly, provided no specific citation (that is, a source URL) for its claim about homicides involving guns.  But it was easy enough for me to find an FBI chart listing murders committed using firearms in 2009.  The number was 9,146.

Update:  The chart I used here does not count data from Florida and does not include an FBI estimate of the numbers from Florida.  Nor did it include any noticeable notation of that omission on the page, but that's another story.  Florida did log statistics that may be plugged into the rest, albeit not meeting FBI standards in some respect or other.  Counting Florida's missing 695 firearm murders, the total does exceed Lautenberg's estimate.  My jury is still out on the estimate used by PolitiFact, but a hat tip goes to James Alan Fox of Northeastern University for providing at least one key to resolving the discrepancy.

Yes, that's bad news for PolitiFact's claim that Lautenberg number "was actually a little low."  Lautenberg may have meant to use the number for 2008 (9,528).  But rounding up to 9,500 from 9,146 goes completely against convention, so Lautenberg can't be counted as correct on this one (actually he can; see update above).  He either got the year or the number of murders wrong.  His figure is in the ballpark, but 9,000 would have been more accurate as a matter of rounding off.

More number-crunching from the media professionals at PolitiFact:

Mamoru Suzuki of the National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan e-mailed us to say that there were seven gun murders in Japan during 2009. (This was no anomaly: In 2007 and 2008, Suzuki said, the number was 21 and 10, respectively.)

Hmm.  Why not ask Lautenberg's office for his source and then criticize that, as PolitiFact does on occasion (sometimes finding claims "false" simply for the lack of affirmative support)?  Perhaps that approach is reserved for a distinct class of cases.  Let's accept that Japan's murder rate for 2009 via firearm is less than 200 and continue to follow along:

(W)e found that the United Kingdom had 63 firearm murders, and Germany had 381 firearm murders. These aren't as current as the statistics from U.S. and Japan, and because they're reverse-engineered, they are estimates. But experts we consulted said the figures sounded about right. They were also on par with Canada: Sara Beattie, the homicide survey manager at Statistics Canada, e-mailed us to say that there were 179 firearm homicides in her country in 2009.

I'm not sure what PolitiFact bothers to mention Canada, since Canada wasn't part of Lautenberg's claim.  Thailand and Mexico are big countries, too, and we don't bother to mention the number of firearm murders or homicides in either one.  Can't we let Lautenberg pick his own cherries?  Perhaps PolitiFact was trying to help out since one of Lautenberg's cherries--Germany--didn't pan out.  It turns out that 381 is not less than 200.  So the only one that wasn't an island was wrong.

No worries, Frank!  PolitiFact says you're close or something:

So, Japan and the United Kingdom were well within Lautenberg's stated threshold of 200 murders per year. Germany's total exceeded that threshold, but it still represented less than 4 percent of the number of killings in the United States in 2009.

Though the cherry was not as described, we can still call it a cherry, I suppose.  But we can't say Lautenberg's figures were accurate without lying, and it remains to be seen what kind of underlying argument receives reasonable support from cherry-picked figures.

Germany's total is actually over four percent of the U.S. total, using the correct FBI figure.

More from the experts:

We'll point out three additional bits of context.

The first is that Lautenberg offered an absolute number of killings, not one adjusted according to population size. Population differences can be a significant factor, but in this case, the differences in killings are so great that even adjusting for a country's size doesn't change the comparison very much.

The cherries are still cherries even if Lautenberg can't get the figures right, in other words.

PolitiFact expertise:

The second is that while the U.S. firearm murder rate is indeed high when compared to most advanced industrialized countries, there are nations that do have higher rates. In the U.N. study, the U.S. ranked eighth out of 32 nations studied, with South Africa, Colombia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Belarus and Costa Rica reporting higher rates.

The U.N. study data come from over 10 years ago, by the way.  But the point holds.  Many large countries have higher per capita firearm murders than the United States, and some have more total murders despite smaller populations.  Lautenberg cherry-picked his data.

PolitiFact:

The third is that not everyone agrees that guns by themselves are the key factor of the relatively high U.S. rate of firearm murders. "The U.S. also has a far higher rate of murders committed with knives, but I doubt that cutlery ownership is any higher in the U.S. than in Japan, Germany, and the U.K.," said Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. "America is more violent than other nations in ways unrelated to guns and for reasons having nothing to do with the rate of gun ownership."

Oops. Kleck just contradicted Lautenberg's plainly-spoken underlying argument. Best not mention that in the story. Right, PolitiFact? Right!

But at least we get a list of the majority of experts who agree that guns by themselves are the key factor. Oh, wait, no we don't. You'll just have to take PolitiFact's implied word for that.

Seriously, if it's going to be implied that a majority do believe it, isn't it worth citing an expert or two to substantiate the claim?

This is supposed to be a fact check, isn't it?

The conclusion is a doozy:

We still don't think these pieces of context undermine the accuracy of Lautenberg's statement. The senator was actually a little low in his estimate of firearm homicides in the U.S. for 2009, and he was accurate in saying that Japan and the United Kingdom had fewer than 200 firearm murders. Germany's number is higher than 200, but is still dramatically lower than the U.S. So we rate his statement Mostly True.

1)  PolitiFact thinks (their word) that Lautenberg's accuracy is not undermined in spite of his cherry-picking.  But PolitiFact presents its stories without plainly marking them as opinion or even as news analysis.
2)  Lautenberg wasn't low with his estimate of firearm homicides in the U.S. for 2009 (Correction:  He probably was a bit low; see update above).  He probably meant to refer to the 2008 figure, and PolitiFact simply blew the attempt to verify his numbers.
3)  Lautenberg was right that two island nations have a rate of murders committed using firearms under 200 in for 2009.  PolitiFact apparently sees nothing wrong with cherry-picking figures.
4)  Lautenberg's obvious underlying claim, that the number of guns accounted for the disparity in firearm homicides, was swept under the rug, and though PolitiFact quoted an expert disparaging the idea that expert was presented as holding a minority view without any statement from an expert representing the supposed majority view.

In summary, Lautenberg was wrong on half (make that one-quarter; see update above) the figures he used and wrong with his underlying argument.  What else but "Mostly True" could apply?

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

The tag "journalists reporting badly" applies (and I'll take my lumps for going with the FBI chart omitting figures for Florida; see update above).

Afters:

Related link.