Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
In my piece a couple days back detailing all the dumb gun control ideas we’ll be hearing in the weeks to come, I briefly touched upon the myth of America’s “epidemic of gun violence.” In the aftermath of any sort of mass shooting, the idea that there is not only an epidemic of gun violence, but that congress could fix it but for the Republicans and dastardly NRA, becomes accepted gospel truth by the media.
After the tragic terrorist attack in Orlando, Democrats were guaranteed to use the dead as leverage try to force meaningless, feel-good legislation through congress, an effort that began in earnest yesterday with Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) filibustering the Senate and refusing to give up the floor until republicans agreed to vote on two measures. After 15 hours, he got that Republican commitment to a vote on eliminating due process for people the FBI thinks are yucky and to a vote on pretending people will submit themselves to background checks in private firearm sales and was ostensibly mollified.
“I hope you’ll understand some day why we’re doing this. Trying and trying and trying to do the right thing is ultimately just as important as getting the outcome in the end,” Murphy said, speaking to his son from the Senate floor during his filibuster.
Of course, the “right thing” has nothing to do with taking away due process rights based on one highly-suspect government agency’s opinion of a person, but when you’re busily selling America a lie, you can’t be bothered with such things as respecting the foundations of justice.
And yes, America’s “epidemic of gun violence” is just that, a lie.
This is why anti-liberty stalwarts like the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence” and so many others use bogus, inflated statistics to support their central lie.
“108,000 (108,476) are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, or by police intervention.” Reads a quote from the Brady Campaign website, the emphasis is original, and misplaced.
The bold print should have been on “suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings,” but we do have to give them credit for acknowledging they were including those numbers in their computing of “gun violence.” Now, to most sane people, when someone talks about the problem of “gun violence” there is an obvious, unstated implication that the term refers to, or ought to refer to, violence done by one person to another with malicious intent. That is the sort of “gun violence” that the average person is typically concerned about since that’s the only sort of gun violence the average person is likely to unwittingly fall victim to. Nobody is the victim of a random suicide with a gun. Nobody refers to late actor Michael Carradine as a victim of “rope violence.”
Including injuries and deaths attributed to the accidental discharge of a firearm among stats purporting to chronicle “gun violence” is equally misleading and disingenuous. Again, “gun violence” implies intent. Accidents are, by definition, events that happen unintentionally. Late actor Paul Walker did not die of “car violence;” he died in a car accident.
Here are some more fun numbers from the Brady Campaign: “32,514 people die from gun violence.”
As Sterling Archer might say: “phrasing?” But, the Brady Campaign is quick to provide some perspective.
“11,294 people are murdered, 19,992 people kill themselves, 561 people are killed unintentionally, 414 are killed by police intervention, 254 die but intent is not known,” the Brady Campaign website claims.
What the Brady Campaign and other such groups that rely on those numbers cannot ever bring themselves to say is that each year, in a nation of nearly 300,000 million people that own nearly a half-billion guns and more than a trillion rounds of ammunition, 11,294 people are shot to death with malice.
Really doesn’t sound that dire, does it? So, they nearly triple the real number of “gun violence” deaths by including any incident involving any gun, as if a person committing suicide with a gun poses an existential threat to anyone else, as if accidents happen with malice.
If the Brady Campaign, Everytown for Gun Safety, etc. actually have a legitimate point, why then do they insist on relying upon vastly inflated “statistics” to justify their cause? Seems to me if one has a legitimate point, then salient facts alone ought to bear it out. If one must pad their statistics to include incidents that leave no unwilling victim as an example of “gun violence” then perhaps one doesn’t have a point to begin with? Yeah, no “perhaps” about it.
Another tactic the Left tries to bring to bear against basic human rights is to attempt to downplay the number of defensive gun uses that happen each year. They succeed at this to the extent they do because the vast majority of defensive gun uses do not even involve a shot being fired and are rarely reported to police; thus making them rather hard to quantify.
The focus of the Left’s attack on defensive gun uses (DGUs) is a study put together in 1994 by Florida State University criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck. His study found that Americans use a gun for self-defense more than two million times each year on average – and this was in 1993-1994, when most states still didn’t have concealed carry laws.
The Left has waged war on the study, its methodology and upon the characters of Kleck and his partner Marc Gertz ever since. Several studies have been conducted in an effort to debunk Kleck and Gertz’s findings. The left-leaning, anti-gun Violence Policy Center conducted its own study on defensive gun uses over a five-year period and gleefully reported they could only find some 338,700 documented defensive gun uses total during that time.
Never mind the fact that, averaged out over that five year period, their own study found there were at least 67,000 defensive gun uses per year.
67,000 documented, legitimate defensive gun uses per year versus 11,300 homicides, on average.
No wonder the Left has to sell us the lie of 32,514 annual victims of “gun violence.” Arguing against a roughly 2:1 ratio of lives saved versus lives lost due to firearms is a tough enough sell. Imagine if they actually told the truth that for every homicide committed with a firearm there are at the very least 5.9 people who legitimately use one for self-defense?
The fact that the anti-gun Left is peddling a lie comes with its own questions. Namely: why? The relentless push to further regulate guns and gun ownership has exactly nothing to do with public safety, as public safety is actually threatened and diminished by every law and regulation they propose. Being the cynical, jaundiced, jaded bastard I am; I’m reasonably certain the Left merely looks at the hoplophobes as a voting bloc – a source of safe, secure votes for Democrats. Like any voting bloc, they have to be pandered to, lest you lose them – though in the case of hoplophobes, there’s no other place for them to go, so, the Democrats can take their votes for granted. And do. The hoplophobes themselves are just useful idiots to the Democrats. They believe passionately in their cause, because they’ve been programmed to by the non-stop lies of The Brady Campaign et. al., and they take to the Internet to spread their imbecility so as to try to make their voting bloc bigger. Their primary weapon, other than lies and inflated, bogus “stats” are fallacious arguments with straw men and appeals-to-emotion being the most common.
That tools and puppets shouldn’t be allowed to muck about with any right enshrined in the Bill of Rights goes without saying. That no human being should have what means of self-defense he may own dictated to him by fools who know nothing about firearms other than the fact they have plenty of taxpayer-provided armed security to hide behind, doubly so.
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