When Summer of Blood 2015 came to a close, 3,702 people had been killed in the United States by people wielding guns.  That’s according to a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, a left-wing “crowdsourced” collective dedicated to reporting every single incident of “gun violence” and to using phrases like “gun violence” and “killed by guns.”  This was paired with the grim statistic that 8,153 humans were wounded “by guns” in that same period spanning from Memorial Day Weekend to August 28.

Another antigun website, The Trace, takes this data and turns it into essays aimed at silencing the voice of “the gun lobby” and restricting the freedoms of tens of thousands of people (like me) who own lots of guns yet never struggle with thoughts of drawing one of them during a political debate or proving their virility by challenging a rogue editor to a duel.

The Trace’s “Just Another Bloody Summer” (September 4) briefly admits that, statistically, the uptick in “gun violence” from the summer of 2014 to 2015 isn’t significant, though the article fails to include the percentage figures.  That’s .88 percent for those wounded by (people wielding) guns and .99 percent for deaths caused by (people wielding) guns.

For students learning Common Core math, I will obviate the need to draw stick men on the board: In both cases, the increase is less than one percent.

The fact that the rise in “gun violence” is insignificant does not deter these activists from holding out hope that America’s news consumers will continue to feel that the carnage is far greater: “What has seemed potentially significant is the effect on perceptions.”

The folks at The Trace and Mass Shooting Tracker (a project of the ironically named journalist group GunsAreCool) want lots of new gun laws, and they seem to suggest that something akin to a vast right-wing conspiracy is hindering this goal.  Indeed, on the surface they are correct: All summer long and into the fall, we heard endless reporting on high-profile mass shootings—Dylann Roof, John Houser, Mohammad Abdulazeez, Vester Flanagan—while the national press barely (if at all) noticed the truly disturbing “125 incidents” of mass shootings “since Memorial Day,” which amounted to “more than one every 24 hours.”

The chief tool of the conspiracy is, according to these groups, the mainstream media’s definition of mass shooting, which for reasons that seem to mystify them excludes incidences of mass woundings and mass killings that involve firearms but take place in a private setting or can be connected in any way to gangs.

In other words, house parties and drive-bys.

They further explain that the NRA and other gun-lobby fascists want to minimize reportage on mass shootings so that “gun violence” can be attributed to being a mental case or a Muslim, and not to the naked existence of the guns themselves.

“Just Another Bloody Summer” rattles off a long list of examples of scant-reported mass shootings that fit the activists’ broader definition.  But click on the links that appear mid-sentence in each example, and a pattern emerges: Every single one of them involves the black underclass.  These are links to local news reports, and while nary a one says that “the suspect is described as a black male,” because to do so would be racist, the mugshots and arrest pictures show the sad reality.

It’s the same sad reality that the national media cleverly avoids by narrowing its definition of mass shooting.

Instead, the media has used the most high-profile (by its own making) act of mass murder to fire a full banana clip at the Confederate States of America a mere century and a half after its death, and to turn the act of burning a Battle Flag into a sacrament.

Meanwhile, the left, the media, and the racist fringe of the sociobiological right (of which Roof was so enamored) continue apace in treating blacks as subhumans fit only for affirmative action and welfare-enriched ghettos.  Both sides agree that keeping guns out of their hands will somehow stop them from killing one another.  Neither side begins with a Christian perspective on human nature, sin, and sin’s occasions.  They rest in their unquestioned racial determinism and profess to have solutions to the problems of serial illegitimacy and a culture of violence that will only cause more problems because they are the cause of the current problems.  Conservatives must resist the urge to think like the race-baiters of either side, refusing to blame guns and/or blackness for cultural and spiritual problems that can be addressed only culturally and spiritually, and that are massively magnified by a condescending and paternalistic Welfare State.

Unless and until those problems are addressed, we have Summer of Blood 2016 to look forward to, in which the levels of “gun violence” will seem to grow substantially, but will in reality remain the same, along with the seemingly permanent underclass of liberal pets and racist bugaboos.