There are a lot of gun control groups, which means there are a lot of people who run them. Po Murray is one such person. She’s the chair of Newtown Action Alliance, a group formed after the awful tragedy in Sandy Hook.
If you’re unfamiliar with her, you shouldn’t be surprised. She’s not nearly as clever as many of her colleagues as a general rule.
Yet this week, she offered up a tweet that illustrated just how often anti-gunners try to lie with numbers and statistics.
We live in a war zone. pic.twitter.com/HNiRgJq6f7
— Po Murray (@po_murray) January 24, 2023
Now, that looks absolutely awful. How are we seeing more innocent people killed in this country than are killed in a literal war zone? Clearly, this is a sign that something needs to be done.
Of course, that’s what you’re supposed to see and think.
However, something about this didn’t seem right. You see, these numbers may be factually correct, but they don’t give you any perspective through which one can really gain an appreciation of the problem. They’re just big numbers designed to look impressive and/or terrifying.
So I opted to take a bit of a look at those numbers.
First, let’s look at the population of each country.
Ukraine has a total population of around 43 million people. Meanwhile, the United States has 336 million people. That means we have 7.81 times as many folks as Ukraine.
Now, let’s look at the number of people killed. If we do the same math, dividing the American numbers by the Ukrainian numbers, we get a figure of 2.91 times as many people killed.
“See? Almost three times as many people are killed in the United States as in a war zone!”
By raw numbers, sure. But since we have nearly eight times the population, it means that on a per capita basis, we’re seeing fewer people killed than in Ukraine.
This isn’t difficult math to do, but most people won’t bother.
Yes, it’s very possible that Po didn’t do the math either, that she just saw big, scary numbers and shared it on Twitter. Based on her past tweets, it’s entirely likely that she didn’t. Then again, based on some of her tweets, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she can’t even do math, so there’s that.
Yet someone out there shared this that could. They just didn’t. Why would they? This particular lie benefits people like the Newtown Action Alliance.
See, people like that don’t really deal in facts. They try to use numbers and statistics to evoke an emotional reaction. Emotional people are far more likely to support gun control than those who actually look at the numbers.
Once people see that the ratio of people killed to population is off, they recognize just how idiotic this entire argument actually is.
So they simply don’t talk about it. They try to distract you with scary numbers and hope you’ll be too lazy to look.
The problem is, they’re right. Most people won’t look at it. They won’t bother to try and figure anything out for themselves.
We are not living in a war zone. Not in the nation as a whole, anyway.
Sure, there are bad areas. We’ve talked about it before. But Po Murray and the Newtown Action Alliance typically like the gun control laws on the books in those places. They just want the rest of the nation to give up our guns for the benefit of those bad areas, despite those laws doing absolutely nothing in the first place.
That’s never acknowledged by people like Murray. Instead, they use scary numbers to mislead people into thinking we have a bigger problem than we do.
Like comparing fatalities in a war zone in a nation much, much smaller than us without sharing how, in proportion to population, innocent people are killed there at a much higher rate, as one would expect.
Yet they want to make you think that expectation doesn’t reflect reality, so they hide the context so you’ll reach the conclusion they want you to reach.
This is what groups like Newtown Action Alliance are all about. They don’t care about the facts. They just want to restrict your right to keep and bear arms and they’ll tell any lies they think they can get away with in order to make that happen.
