By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Lawmakers in Tennessee have wrapped up their special session on public safety without adopting any new gun controls, and the New York Times is reporting the gathering was “an emotional and chaotic week…punctuated with tearful pleas from parents” whose children survived the shooting incident at Nashville school earlier this year.
Republicans control the legislature, so it was a longshot any new gun restrictions would be passed, butm buried in the Times story was a sentence which could easily ignite a whole new debate.
“And both chambers rejected calls from Democrats to address gun violence,” the story observed, “the leading cause of death for children in the United States.”
By no small coincidence, the National Rifle Association published a report produced by its Institute for Legislative Action, which challenges that assertion. The NRA article calls the child gun death claim a “misleading factoid.”
According to the NRA/ILA piece, anti-gunners “acquire statistics on firearm-related deaths among children ages 0-14.” Next, they combine that number with the “far greater number of firearm-related deaths involving juveniles and young adults” (ages 15-19 or even 15-24) and then claim the combined number to distort the truth “to advocate for pre-determined gun control policies.”
NRA calls the data a “disingenuous statistic.”
In past years, there were repeated claims by gun rights activists that the gun control lobby habitually combined suicide, homicide and accidental firearm deaths and called all of these fatalities the result of “gun violence.” The term, itself, is subject to suspicion because there is no textbook definition of what it is. Does it mean people getting shot, or people being murdered? Does it include shots fired during a crime when nobody is hurt?
Nowadays, most news reports on so-called “gun violence” mention the difference between suicide and homicide numbers, acknowledging there are more gun-related suicides annually than homicides. In addition, FBI data for any given year shows rifles of any kind, including semi-autos, are used in a fraction of all gun-related murders.
The crime which set in motion the gun control debate in Tennessee happened in Nashville in March. A transgender individual identified as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, entered the Covenant School, shooting her way into the building. She killed three adults and three children before responding Nashville police rushed into the building and fatally shot Hale on the second floor within minutes, all captured on body camera footage.
Hale left a manifesto, but months later the public is still waiting to learn what it contained.
