Anti-gunners use deceptive rhetoric to erode the Second Amendment. (Dave Workman)
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
On the heels of another violent Memorial Day weekend in Chicago – though it was less violent than last year – an article in American Thinker dished out some uncomfortable facts for the gun prohibition lobby.
Writer Ben Cohen referenced a 2016 piece by R. Douglas Fields, Ph.D. in Psychology Today that bluntly stated, “Statistics do not support a connection between gun control and US suicide rates.”
This is not the kind of information one would hear at a fund-raising luncheon for anti-gunners, nor would one read it in any of the fund raising emails circulated regularly by lobbying groups such as Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety.
But here it is down and dirty, from the Fields article: “There is no relation between suicide rate and gun ownership rates around the world. According to the 2016 World Health Statistics report, (2) suicide rates in the four countries cited as having restrictive gun control laws have suicide rates that are comparable to that in the U. S. Australia, 11.6, Canada, 11.4, France, 15.8, UK, 7.0, and USA 13.7 suicides/100,000. By comparison, Japan has among the highest suicide rates in the world, 23.1/100,000, but gun ownership is extremely rare, 0.6 guns/100 people.”
And here’s what Cohen offered: “The data on gun control and homicide rates doesn’t support the claims of gun-control activists either. The U.S has a lot of guns, and compared to other developed nations a lot of homicide. However, this relationship doesn’t appear to hold for other countries, and may in fact be the inverse. More importantly, homicide in America is demographically concentrated among young black males; non-Hispanic whites do not have a particularly high homicide rate.”
Over the Memorial Day weekend, Chicago’s WGN reported that six people were murdered and 43 more were wounded. This is down from the same weekend in 2016 during which seven people were slain and 71 were wounded. Grim as it may seem, this year’s statistics showed some improvement over last year’s, though noting this seems small compensation.
Gun prohibitionists would certainly disagree, because to admit that Fields and Cohen are on to something just might erode their credibility faster than they’ve been trying to erode the Second Amendment.
It is widely known that anti-gunners routinely combine homicide and suicide numbers to come up with a number to support their claim that there are “30,000 gun deaths annually.” The rhetoric is designed to mislead people into thinking there are that many gun-related homicides each year. A check of the annual FBI Uniform Crime Reports, typically released in September, puts the lie to this assertion.
In an article published by the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) the group asserted that the gun control agenda is furthered by combining statistics on youth and children who die or are injured by gunshots:
- Step one, acquire statistics on firearms injuries among children ages 0-14.
- Step two, combine these relatively low numbers with the far greater numbers of firearms injuries involving juveniles and young adults ages 15-19.
- Step three, present the resulting statistics as the shocking number of “children” (ages 0-19) who are subjected to “gun violence” each day/week/month/year.
- Step four, use the disingenuous statistics to advocate for handgun bans/registration and licensing/storage restrictions.
