On Saturday's CNN Newsroom, during an interview with former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, CNN host Ana Cabrera failed to inform viewers of some very important facts as she discussed the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate's successes in passing gun control in his home state in 2013.
As the CNN host asked the Democratic presidential candidate about the issue of how to get at least some Republicans to go along with such measures, she failed to note that violent crime has increased substantially in Colorado every year since the passage of more gun control in 2013.
What's more, violent crime had been on a steady decline over the previous decade before the new gun restrictions were adopted, making the crime change in the wrong direction even more striking.
Cabrera noted that Hickenlooper had enacted gun control in his state in response to the 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora movie theater, and, in her second question to him, posed:
As governor in 2013, you managed to get universal background checks for all gun purchases, you got a high-capacity magazine ban limit, but you got those laws without any Republican support. That obviously can't work on a national level, so what's it going to take?
Hickenlooper complained about the NRA lobbying against "universal background checks" in his state, and claimed that all the Republicans he knew supported the measure, leading Cabrera to follow up: "Right, and isn't that the situation we're dealing with now, too? So, again, how do you get past that? How do you break through that to actually accomplish it in a bipartisan fashion if you can't just rely on one party to do it?"
After her guest praised Republican governors who have supported pushing more gun control, and predicted there will be more cooperation by Republicans in Congress, instead of bothering to cover the issue of what happened to crime in Colorado after gun control measures passed, Cabrera pivoted to Democrats accusing President Donald Trump of being a "white supremacist."
If the CNN staff had bothered to do basic research on the issue, they could have easily discovered that the per capita violent crime rate increased steadily from 307.4 per 100,000 residents in 2012 to 368.1 in 2017 -- an increase of 20 percent -- to the highest level since 2006.
Even more striking is the fact that there had been a steady drop every year between 2006 and 2013 before the rates started increasing.
As for homicides, which had already started to increase in 2011, the number continued to move upward from 152 in 2012 to 221 in 2017 -- the highest number since 1986. Or, adjusted for population growth, the homicide rate became the highest since 2004.
Last year, her colleague, host Fredricka Whitfield, failed to press former Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley over the increases in crime that have occurred in his state since it adopted more gun control.
It seems that, where gun control is concerned, the only success that matters to CNN journalists is actually passing the gun restrictions -- not the apparent counterproductive effects on crime levels seen in the real world.
