Gun Control Crowd Continues To Misinform With False "Statistics"

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Leave it to the gun grabbers to never let the facts get in the way of a good argument. After all, reality has a pesky way of undermining their so-called “facts” when anyone looks deeper, so they don’t give anyone enough information to really understand what they’re peddling.

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Take, for example, this story at The Huffington Post.

He asserts that in the wake of these attacks, there are new calls for gun control. Maybe his staff found some obscure story on Fox or Brietbart or Guns.com and came up with this idea, but I work closely with gun violence prevention groups and what he says is simply not true. Our message is consistent, and I’ve seen no spike tied to the events in Europe.

Morgan [Griffith] makes the ridiculous false equivalent that terrorists using cars as a weapon are the same as this plague of gun violence. It’s the same flawed “whataboutism” we see from him and his ilk time after time. Sure, a hammer or a knife or a toaster for that matter can be used to kill someone. But hammers and knives don’t kill 90 people a day. As tragic as the terrorist incidents involving cars are, making that comparison is flawed and insulting.

The author of this post is right. Hammers and knives don’t kill 90 people per day.

But neither do guns.

The total number of homicides in 2015–the most recent year we have numbers for at this point (new ones should be coming out soon)–was 15,696. That’s just a smidge over 43 homicides per day.

Total.

In other words, even if every single homicide was committed with a gun, the author’s numbers are still wildly inaccurate. Yet anyone with a half a functioning brain cell understands that not all homicides are committed with a gun. Further, not all of those homicides are actually crimes. The FBI’s statistics deal primarily with charges, not the outcomes. Cases like this one are counted as homicides but are later ruled as self-defense, thus making the count of actual homicides for the year reduced.

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What the statistic here is doing is taking homicides where a firearm was the weapon used and adding in things like accidents and suicides. Now, don’t get me wrong, even one person killed accidentally with a firearm is too many, but people are killed accidentally by cars as well. In fact, since the author was speaking in response to a comment about cars, let’s play a little game.

Let’s look at the total number of people killed in automotive collisions and compare it to the total number of people killed in homicides in total for 2015 and see what happens.

Total homicides with all weapons: 15,696

Total killed in automotive crashes: 35,092

Holy cow! More than twice as many people were killed in car accidents as were killed in homicides total. Based on the FBI’s data on murder charges and weapons used for 2015, only about 71 percent of homicides used a firearm, but let’s keep playing for a moment.

The author believes that firearms should be heavily restricted because supposedly 90 people per day die, a statistic we’ve shown presents skewed information at best, but thinks comparing them to cars is ridiculous. However, since the author is adding in suicides and accidents into the firearm statistics, it’s only fair if we do the same.

The number of people killed in auto crashes per day in the US? A hair over 96. That’s six more people than the author’s bogus statistic on guns, and it doesn’t account for people killed intentionally with cars each year, nor does it count for the people who may use a vehicle to commit suicide in any manner that isn’t an auto collision.

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The author at Huffington Post says comparing guns to firearms is “flawed and insulting.” I find myself agreeing, but not for the reasons he may hope. No, I agree because it’s insulting to the Second Amendment, a constitutionally protected, God-given right, and he should be ashamed of himself.

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