The government of China is not a fan of our right to keep and bear arms. That, to me, is all the more reason to support it, but I’m not a fan of communist nations.

One thing the government there does, though, to try and undermine our right to keep and bear arms–to say nothing of trying to distract the world from their crimes against human rights–is use state-run media to try and present guns as a problem.

And that means blatantly misrepresenting the reality on the ground here in an effort to terrify Americans.

Take this latest effort:

Meanwhile, the most recent data show that 2021 had the highest number of gun deaths ever recorded: 48,830. An average of 134 people died each day from gun violence, or 1 death every 11 minutes.

The record number of deaths was due to large increases in both gun homicides and gun suicides, according to a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

The 2021 record of gun deaths was an increase of more than 3,600 deaths from 2020 — the previous record high — as the number of deaths involving a gun soared during the first and second years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

…

Ari Davis, policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and lead author of the new report said in a statement: “Our country is breaking records for all the wrong reasons — record gun sales combined with increasingly permissive gun laws are making gun violence a pervasive part of life in our country, leading to a sharp increase in gun deaths.”

As a policy advisor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Davis should be aware of the fact that this is a blatant misrepresentation of what’s actually happening.

Yes, the raw numbers are high.

The homicide rate, however, is nowhere near record highs. That’s in part because the total rate lumps in suicides, which one cannot assume will just vanish if guns weren’t around and thus shouldn’t be included at all, and also because they fail to account for growth in population.

Now, I’ll give China Daily credit for at least acknowledging suicides. They do get into that and talk about how a large chunk of those deaths are, in fact, from people taking their own lives. I’ll grant them that.

But China’s preoccupation with our right to keep and bear arms is still troubling, especially as they continue to hold people in literal concentration camps.

That’s something that’s not likely to happen here. Not now, anyway, though we can’t say it’s never happened.

Part of the reason is that we have guns. We have the means to keep the government in check, something China is very vehemently opposed to, as we saw in Tiananmen Square.

So, they use numbers to misrepresent what’s actually happening so as to scare us into giving up our guns. Then, if there is a shooting war with the United States–something that really feels more like a “when” versus an “if”–and they land on American shores, there will be less resistance.

Or maybe I’m just a smidge paranoid.

Still, when a hostile foreign power starts pretending it cares about your people and suggests giving up rights that could be turned against it, maybe it’s time to double down on said right.

But that’s just me.