RUSH: Earlier this week… Is this Thursday already? It is. We had news earlier this week — in fact, it might have been yesterday; if not yesterday, the day before — about the falling numbers of gun deaths and gun crimes. I think it was yesterday. It’s striking. The amount of murders with guns since the mid-1990s is plummeting. I think they’re down 39%, and overall crimes with guns are down 69%.

This is the LA Times, by the way. The story was the American people don’t know this. The American people think that crime with guns is on the uptick, and they think this because of the focused coverage in places like Aurora, Colorado, and the Gabby Giffords incident, and Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. (I’m getting it confused with the hurricane location.) Anyway, they think gun Drive-By Media is just going through the roof, and it’s not.

Gun crime is down.

Now, here’s a headline in the Christian Science Monitor: “With Gun Violence Down, is America Arming Against an Imagined Threat?” Oh, yeah! “You people are arming up but the threats that you feel out there are imaginary. You’ve got no reason to be arming up. Gun crime is down. Murders with guns are way down. What are you doing, arming up? What are you doing buying all those guns? You got no business doing this!”

The Monitor: “Mass shootings, frantic gun-buying, and more Americans legally carrying guns on the street all point to a country fighting a gun violence epidemic, right? Not necessarily. As part of a broader trend of declining crime, gun violence in America — while still high relative to other Western countries — has dropped by 49% from 1993 to 2011, while nonfatal gun crimes dropped by 69%, according to the US Justice Department.

“But that slow-motion decline in Americans turning guns on each other has failed to register with most people, only 12% of whom answered the question correctly when asked by the Pew Research Center in a poll released Tuesday. Some 56% of respondents said they believed that gun violence had actually increased over the last 20 years. … ‘The gun prohibition lobby has long promoted this idea that reducing the number of guns is a good idea, that fewer guns are better categorically,’ says Dave Kopel, a research analyst at the Independence Institute in Denver.

“‘But here we have a real world experiment which shows the opposite, where we have a huge decline in gun crime at the same time as there’s been an enormous increase in the firearms supply in the United States. It doesn’t prove that the increase in gun numbers or licensed carry caused the decline, but it sure does contest the simplistic theory … that more guns equal more crime.'” Now, I don’t think that the Christian Science Monitor — I don’t think the left intended this correlation.

I think when they put this story out, “Gun crime is way down, so there’s no reason for you to have a gun,” was what they wanted to convey. “Gun crimes and murders with guns? It’s way down since the nineties! What business do you have buying a gun? You don’t need to be buying guns! You’re arming up over an imagined threat.” What the media doesn’t get is, as the American people have “armed up,” gun crime as fallen, dramatically, 49 and 69%. That’s gun crime and gun murders.

Gun violence is down as gun ownership has increased and concealed carry permits have, too. “With Gun Violence Down, is America Arming Against an Imagined Threat?” The media and the headline writer here at the Christian Science Monitor are saying, “You people with guns, you people are actually nuts! You’re wackos. I mean, you’re out there, you’re buying all these guns, and there’s no threat. Gun crime is down. You’re arming up against an imagined threat.

Even when they go talk to the guy from the Independence Institute in Denver who points out, “You know what? Isn’t it strange that as Americans have ‘armed up,’ as you say, gun crime has plummeted?” Because the left loves to say that all these guns out there, and all that ammo out there, “Why, that’s just gonna increase gun crime!” It’s just the exact opposite. I have to laugh here because the Drive-Bys thought they were on to something, and they don’t even see the correlation.

Now, “The paradox provides a poignant backdrop for a national gun debate that had primarily Democrats but also key Republicans pushing for more gun controls, including expanded background checks, in the wake of a string of mass murders…” Why do people think that gun crime is up? That’s obviously clear. It’s because of the media attention and focus on these mass shootings. Do you know that mass shootings are down, too?

Amazingly so. You go back all the way to the forties and fifties, and you will see that mass shootings, like at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown or whatever, are down. They don’t happen nearly as much as they used to. But in the past they didn’t get the media coverage they get today, saturated media coverage — and we don’t just get coverage of the event. After each event we get weeks and weeks of hand-wringing on TV. “Oh, my Lord, woe is us! How terrible this is, Rush! Why are these people doing this? We’ve gotta get guns off the street,” and it’s just the opposite.

It’s just the exact opposite.