Doctors propagating the Big Lie of gun control can't be trusted on firearms policy

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Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is often attributed with the quote, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The gun control crowd knows this and practices their lying almost like a religious ritual. What’s worse is that enough ordinary people, out of their ignorance and unfamiliarity with guns, believe those lies and repeat them so the lies snowball and get a life of their own. The mainstream media, with their own mix of ignorant and malevolent actors, amplifies those lies to make matters worse.

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The new Big Lie of gun control is the false claim that firearms are the leading cause of death of children and teens in America. (Archived). 

This oft-repeated lie has made its appearance on Bloomberg-funded Everytown’s Twitter feed on several occasions. I have addressed it with a direct look at CDC data in a past article on Bearing Arms. Data from the CDC thoroughly shreds Everytown’s false claims. If you don’t believe me, you can run your own reports and do your own analysis on the CDC website.

To summarize what I previously wrote, traffic accidents, drowning, and suffocation clearly outnumber firearms as the leading causes of death of American children. This is true despite Everytown’s statistical chicanery of including the deaths of adult 18- and 19-year-olds to inflate the numbers. (Lying with statistics is a real art.) This gives Everytown the opportunity to scare well-meaning people who don’t have the time to do their own research and make their own determination on Everytown’s honesty or lack thereof.

From what I can tell, this tweet from March 6, 2020, was the first time Everytown made this claim (archived), and it was as much a lie then as it is now.

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I never like wading into statistical debates because manipulated and misrepresented statistics are used as  pretexts to justify infringements on our natural right to keep and bear arms. Still, when the other side abuses statistical data, we have no choice but to engage them on that front.

If you are a Second Amendment advocate, you will likely encounter someone quoting Everytown’s lies as fact. Ordinary people come to believe this because decent dupes with good credentials and reputations have believed and repeated those lies, among whom are medical doctors. Here are examples of some medical doctors who recently repeated Everytown’s lies verbatim:

Dr. Tara Narula, CBS News Senior Medical Correspondent (archived):

Here are doctors who amplified Dr. Narula’s repetition of Everytown’s false claims (archived links):

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Here is a writer for Psych Central who got on the bandwagon without critical thought or examination:

You can watch the full video interview which was at the root of the latest bout of lying here. Bonus: this video features another lie that the Dickey Amendment barred the CDC from doing any research on “gun” violence (at the 3:43 mark), and Dr. Chethan Sathya who falsely claims (at the 4:08 mark) that firearms “have always been at the top” of the leading causes of death.

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First, violence is an issue to be studied by criminologists, not medical doctors. Second, when medical doctors abuse their societal standing to repeat and spread the lies of an agenda-driven group like Everytown, they lose all credibility.

The irony of Everytown’s lying and dissembling is that it will erode gun control. There’s a saying in Hindu scripture, “Satyameva Jayate,” which means “Truth alone triumphs.”

In the end, the leading cause of gun control’s death will be lying. All we need to do is counter the lies using our First Amendment freedoms to speak the truth.

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