I think you - and others - see this for what it is. This study and/or the reportage is tendentious. It is designed to promote a viewpoint not to merely report the news.
It’s easy to envision the editors and reporters at the editorial meeting saying, “Great this is more proof people shouldn’t own guns” or something to that effect.
I was in assigned to SW Phila back in the early 1980’s. It was no gardenspot back then. It was a high crime area with white “cop fighters” on one end and serious, violent black-on-black crime in the other end with racial problems and the Mafia in between.
It’s worse now.
I describe some of my experiences in my novel “A Sense of Duty” available at Barnesandnoble.com (I know it’s a shameless plug. A guy’s gotta make a living somehow.)
Correction to my last post. The third paragraph should read,” I was assigned to” not “I was in assigned to”
In the late 80s my wife and I came north from Bmore to meet friends from Beantown in Philly; we spent the weekend. On Sat morning as we pulled up to the hotel I saw what looked like a 6'x6'x3' high pile of rags on a street corner. It turned out to be a pile of bums on a grate.
We tooled around the city, shopping and so on. Late on Sat evening it was getting dark and the 4 of us were on foot. We hailed a cab and the cabbie gave us story after story along the lines of this one: a guy was walking to work with a lunch in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He was mugged for his briefcase, so he pulled a gun from his lunch bag and shot the mugger. Etc, etc.
We pulled up at a red light in front of our hotel and by then it was dark. While the cabbie was talking us into a a trip to see the boathouse lights (bigger fare) I watched the bellhops PERPETUALLY trying to keep the bums away from the front of the hotel. I've never seen anything like it. We went for the ride and it took us down around by the museum (Rocky's stairs). The cabbie commented on how odd it was to see the two fountains operating. By this point I just had to ask why. He said a couple had been caught in the park. They raped her and drowned him in one of the fountains - so the city shut down the fountains.
These days I have a son who gets paid a free education to pull an oar for a college in Philly so I'm there rather often. BTW I just GOTTA ask… Geno’s or Pat’s?