The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Actions (NRA-ILA) is blasting gun control group American For Responsible Solutions (ARS) for shockingly deceptive claims comparing automobile and gun deaths for young Americans in 2015, where ARS claims that more young Americans will die from “gun violence” than car accidents.

But as the NRA-ILA points out, the ARS claim simply wrecks the truth.

The gun control supporters at Americans for Responsible Solutions ought to rename their group Anti-Gunners for Irresponsible Statistics after the bogus claim they made this week about the number of firearm and car accident deaths among young people each year. The group claimed that there are more than 30,000 firearm-related deaths, plus more than 30,000 car accident deaths among young people each year.

One of the group’s leaders is a former astronaut, so maybe he got those numbers during some of his extraterrestrial travels, but, as the saying goes, “not on this planet.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ WISQARS data query website, in 2013, the most recent year for which data are reported, there were 3,487 motor vehicle traffic accident deaths and 124 firearm accident deaths among persons ages 0-19. That means motor vehicle accidents account for 28 times as many deaths as firearm accidents among people of that age group.

Of course, when gun control supporters compare cars to guns, they try to make guns look as bad as possible, by comparing the number of motor vehicle accident deaths to the grand total number of deaths due to a combination of firearm accidents, suicides, murders, self-defense homicides by private citizens, and homicides by law enforcement officers.

Yes, you read that correctly.

ARS apparently combined all vehicle deaths across all age groups to get their 32,036 “youth” projection for auto accidents, and then combined every kind of possible firearm death across all age groups to get their “youth” gun deaths.

The ARS data is a statistical trainwreck of incompetence and false claims.

If we were comparing “accidents” to “accidents,” as should be the case in an honest claim ARS would be forced to admit that around 3,400 U19s are expected to die in automobile accidents, while less than 200 (PDF) are likely to die of firearms accidents.

Of course, gun control groups have never felt compelled to deal honestly with data, feeling that lying to their supporters in support of their shared beliefs is an acceptable trade off.

It’s too bad they haven’t done a damage assessment of their credibility.