The article “Indisputable Proof: Stricter Gun Laws Save Children’s Lives” was posted in Facebook by one of the Gun Control Cults this morning but I don’t remember which. Initially I was going to ignore it, but since I had a break from getting ready to do some grilling of a piece of dead cow, I gave it a glance…. and started to find issues.
The language of the article is inflammatory and obfuscatory.
First, a look at the problem. American children live in a heavily armed war zone, proven by these extremely troubling statistics:
Apparently Stacie Borrello has never been close to or even seen a war zone in her life. I do love when they get all verbose like that at the beginning of the piece because you know the rest is not going to get any better. The first lot of stats is the usual “comparing apples to meteorites” that we expect to see. But next we are hit with this earth-shattering piece of statistics:
First notice that we have gone from Kids and Teens to Children and Young People (There is a reason) but the numbers suggested (yet not given) were suspicious. Using the Centers For Disease Control Wonder database search engine, I requested all deaths by cancer for 2009 for ages 0 to 19 (To keep it within the Kids and Teens frame) and the number given was 13,678 deaths. If we follow what Ms. Borrello said and double that number, we have that 27,356 Kids and Teens dies in 2009 due to guns and that is pretty much the same number that encompasses every homicide, suicide, legal intervention and accidental deaths for all age groups in the country. And with that load of BS cleared out, I went to do my grilling and then lunch.
When I came back, I detailed the links provided by Ms. Borello and out of the six links provided, four go to Gun Control websites, one to USA Today (well know for his stance against the Second Amendment) and the last one to the Washington Post but this is just a database of personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically, Gun Control Activist relying on bad stats from other Gun Control Activists.
I do want to get back to the difference between Kids and Teens to Children and Young People. Depending where do you seek your info, may it be the CDC, FBI or other agency, they may separate the age data in certain groups: the “0 to 15 years of age and the 16 to 24 years of age” versus the “0 to 19 years of age”. Most stats you’ll see will be divided in the “0 to 15 years of age and the 16 to 24 years of age” which they conveniently parse into Children or Children and Teens because they are counting on you not looking. This will obviously throw a huge distortion on the way the information is perceived as they will hammer the idea of a “Child” but including adults 18-24 in their discourse. Even the graphic accompanying the article adds to the willful deception:
I am not gonna cover again leading causes of death among age groups, but the point is to see how easy is to manipulate the language by the proper misapplication of terms and a couple of “research” results to provide us with intentionally misguided narrative. When it comes from the Opposition, never take anything a face value and always do your own research.
They’ve gotten away w/ people just blindly accepting their numbers for so long, they don’t even try anymore. Every time they put out something like this, it helps us because it causes ‘fence sitters’ to trust them less and less.
Another trick they’ve pulled is in using “cancer or infection”.
With regards the first, it’s similar to the old bugaboo used by militant
vegans/nobility of nature/”oh-woe-these-modern-times!” types who decry the
skyrocketing of cancer as a cause of death in the modern age. “Nobody got
cancer before the Industrial Revolution!” Know what else was somewhat
uncommon before the Industrial Revolution? Living to see the age of 40 (or
even surviving birth). By and large, cancer is an old man’s disease: you
have to live long enough to get it. Something “children and young people”
conveniently excludes.
And death by infection’s been taking it in the keister since penicillin.
And after some quick googling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Causes_of_death_by_age_group_%28percent%29.png
If they’d defined “children” as under-15s, their stats would have been
flipped upside down (“malignant neoplasms”/”firearms” > 3).
Was gonna say, “Hey, isn’t 19-24 the demographic with the largest overall violent death rate?” and then I clicked your link, and YEP!(and, of course, cars still kill more people in those demographics than guns do.)
My old dad often said “figures don’t lie but liars do figure”.
“American children live in a heavily armed war zone…”
Is that right? The author is more than welcome to come to Afghanistan and see for herself what children living in a heavily armed war zone look like. I would wager that every child here would cheerfully move to the war torn United States.
Except for Detroit and Chicago, probably.
As a matter of fact, I have heard that it probably is safer on a battlefield in Afghanistan than on the street in Detroit or Chicago.
The United States hasn’t been war-torn since 1865.
Ms. (or probably Mz.) Borrello is a well known Occupy Movement commando and liberal writer. Clearly she has no problem just making crap up out of thin air so she probably has a promising career in the old media.
150% of people polled say that people that suck at math should be taking polls.