Their own facts refute their argument and they don't even realize it.

Its not much more than policy propaganda.  From How Gun Violence Spread Across One American City by Shaila Dewan and Robert Gebeloff.  The subheading is Columbus, Ohio, had only about 100 homicides a year. Then came a pandemic surge. With more guns and looser laws, can the city find its way back to the old normal?

It is an established pattern that in 2020 there were two events which plausibly increased crime, especially in particular American cities - 1) the lockdowns associated with the government response to Covid-19 and 2) the calls for defunding the police following the George Floyd riots in May 2020.  Just as with the Ferguson riots, there is the same pattern - riots lead in some cities to a retrenchment and/or reduction in policing followed within the year by a rise in the murder rate.  After two or three years, there is public objection, policing is gradually restored and crime begins to fall again.  

The plausible case for lockdowns increasing crime remains plausible but unproven.  The case that defunding police and more general efforts to reduce policing did indeed lead to a rise in crime is much more well established. 

Woke policy people, such as "reporters" at the New York Times, believe that gun availability drives crime.  This despite the fact that there is virtually no correlation between gun ownership and rising crime.  Gun ownership has been rising year on year for forty years, more in some years than in others, but always rising.

On the other hand, crime has fallen steeply from circa 1995 until 2014 and the Ferguson riots when violent crime shot up again temporarily.  But then by 2016, crime started falling once more.  Until 2020 and the George Floyd riots.  Crime shot up, primarily in a couple of dozen large cities which toyed with defunding the police, showed a proclivity for show trials against police officers or who otherwise sought to reduce policing as well as reducing incarceration.  

In the same country in all our thousands of jurisdictions,  it is demonstrably true that a gradual rise in gun ownership is not correlated with the rise in crime.  It is policing and incarceration which correlate with rises and falls in crime, not changes in gun ownership.

This is well publicized, reasonably documented and widely publicized in different publications, but you would not know it from Dewan and Gebeloff's "reporting."  Control F with Riots, George Flow, and Defund the Police as causes of rising crime and you get nothing back.  

D&G focus first on Ohio's increasing gun rights.  They never offer a quantification for what that means for gun ownership prevalence in Columbus or in Ohio, seemingly a critical element to their argument.

The balance of their reporting is police blotter sketches of tragedies from social breakdown, dysfunctional families and reduced policing.  They have half a dozen or so stories about teens and younger killing one another.  For all that Ohio has reduced barriers to gun ownership, it has not made it legal for young teens to buy and own guns.  Indeed, you have to be at least eighteen to purchase a firearm, and twenty-one to purchase a handgun (the weapon responsible for the overwhelming majority of murders.)  

No evidence is offered that rising gun ownership has caused rising crime and no evidence is offered that increased gun controls would reduce violent crime.  Rather, the inadvertent opposite.  For all their complaints of rising gun ownership, they acknowledge:

There is optimism that 2024 is going to be better in Columbus, which has seen homicide numbers fall dramatically so far this year, with 36 as of last week, compared with 70 in the same period the year before. 

Dewan and Gebeloff report that violent crime is falling while gun ownership is rising.  So much for their argument.  

They are not making an argument based on evidence, logic and reason.  They are not reporting facts to provide the whole story.  They are pushing ideological policies without an evidentiary basis.  They are policy propagandists.