(1700 words)
It is generally excepted that the standard methods of lying are:
- Contradicting the truth.
- Omitting parts of the truth.
- Telling the truth
The first is by far the easiest. Even a child (or judge) can do it. “Jill, did you eat the blueberries?” “No daddy!” she responds with her face covered in blueberry juices.
Omitting part of the truth happens in things like the Second Amendment is [not] a regulatory straightjacket
—New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) This citation is used in almost all infringement cases, but read it in full, in context.
—id.
The fuller quote shows that this is a balanced statement. The state can try to get close, it is up to the court to determine if they are close enough. The courts are limited because this is not a “blank check”.
The third method is the hardest yet the most successful method. When you tell the absolute truth in such away that you are not believed or such that people jump to conclusions that are not the truth.
The other day, I was driving home with my wife. She started to open a protein bar. I asked her to put it away because it would spoil her lunch. She happily did so because we were approaching the city and some of her favorite restaurants are there. I asked her, “You like Five Guys, don’t you?” she replied in the positive. “Five Guys is much better than a protein bar.” “Yeah…”
We were pulling into one of her favorite restaurants before she realized that we were not going to Five Guys.
She accused me of lying to her. I made her replay the conversation, at which point she realized that I had never said we were going to Five Guys. I had asked her questions that let her easily assume that was where we were going.
A Master Class in Lying and Misleading, from NJ.com
This is an example of lying by omission. There is a true statement, “Bruen severely limited a state’s power to control guns” While the state does have rights in regard to the federal government, they have powers over their citizens. They never had the right to control guns, they had the power to control guns.
The second part is the omission, it is true that gun-rights advocates have tried to erase the restrictions New Jersey placed on where you can carry a firearm. They fail to mention that those restrictions were put in place after the Bruen decision. It makes a difference.
This is an absolutely true statement. And it is a lie. They are attempting to expand the areas where guns are permitted because, in their post Bruen tantrum, New Jersey made most places “sensitive”.
Omissions again. There is no indication that the “Gun Violence Research Center” is a gun-control group. There is no discussion of how come a gang issue is a leading contributor to death by gun. And there is nothing to indicate what types of deaths these are. Justifiable? Suicide? Or actual murder?
Notice the word homicides. A homicide is any death by other than natural causes. To the average reader, this word is synonymous with “murder.” Yet, the word homicide includes all sorts of other deaths. They might be telling the truth, but they are expressing it in such a way that people just assume “murders”.
It is also important to note that their results come from a sample of 11 states out of 50. Of those 11 states, they only track the numbers in some counties. Why did they pick 2010? Is it the same reason that they start counting the number of victims of terrorists in the US from 2002? The excuse sounds reasonable, but what are the hidden implications?
—Richard Stansfield et al., The Relationship between Concealed Carry Licenses and Firearm Homicide in the US: A Reciprocal County-Level Analysis, 100 Journal of Urban Health 657–65 (Aug. 2023)
The text of their paper is behind a $40.00 paywall. I put this abstract here to contrast it with a different abstract:
The first thing that I noticed is that they are using methods that I actually understand. That’s not important, I don’t do statistical studies, so most of the jargon is beyond me. What is significant is that even in the abstract, they are giving hard numbers.
This means that you can assess what their words actually represent.
To wrap this up:
A. It was a more comprehensive way to look at the link between concealed carry and homicides over time. People often talk about how correlation is not causation, which is true, and scientists are very cautious when saying anything causes something. But because of the modeling we used, we could ask, “Do concealed carries increase homicides the following year?” Or on the flip side: “Are people just getting more permits and guns because there are more homicides?” We saw some indication that permits increase when homicides are up.
But the majority of what we found was that the more concealed carry permits went up, homicides went up in the following year. Again, this is backed by research from others outside our team. Another recent study from Johns Hopkins found that states saw jumps of about 10% in firearm assaults following adoption of shall-issue carry laws. So in addition to the fact that we didn’t really see any defensive gun-use effect, we concluded that broadening concealed-carry – which might include allowing more concealed-carry in more places – would have a more harmful effect on public safety than doing anything to reduce the risk of shootings through defensive use.
—Board, supra
Until We the People can rid the world of power hungry liberals we will be in this fight. Sad that in liberal blue cities you can kill unborn babies easier than defending your own life…. Sick twisted evil liberals….
…and in the end those study results are irrelevant to whether concealed carry is legal – it’s a right protected by the Constitution.
The bit about picking just a few states, and a few counties in those few states, is an old familiar scam.
When prof. John Lott published “More guns, less crime” he studied all 50 states. As part of publishing that book he also published the underlying data.
So “researchers” at some university (CMU?) downloaded that data and started to manipulate it. They deleted 6/7th of the data. Having done so, they “showed” that the data they had at that point made the opposite case that Lott had made, i.e., more guns means more crime. Lott caught them at it and exposed the scam in an appendix to the book’s second edition.
There are other examples. A notorious one is the claim in 1975 (discussed by Neil Schulman in “Stopping Power”) that “guns in the home are more dangerous than useful to the homeowner and his family who keep them to protect their persons and property”. What they actually studied was a 15 year period in ONE county (Cuyahoga Co. which includes Cleveland OH). And they reported that there were six times as many home fatal gun accidents as burglars killed. Neil Schulman points out, very properly, that this is a morally offensive statement because it means the authors are claiming that the purpose of self defense is to kill the attacker. And in addition, it hides the reality that most defensive gun use does not involve the death of the attacker, or even any shots fired at all. (As I recall, Gary Kleck found that the rate of death of the attacker in defensive gun use situations is about TWO percent.)