U.S.A. -(AmmoLand.com)- Gun control groups are at it again. When they need to gin up fear about lawful gun ownership, there’s not a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistic they won’t throw in the bucket to mislead the American public.
Everytown for Gun Control, the gun control group that’s bought and paid for by antigun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, has its own propaganda press called The Trace. It pitches itself as an independent journalist enterprise, but it’s run by longtime Bloomberg lackey John Feinblatt. He’s been at Bloomberg’s side pushing antigun agendas since Bloomberg’s days as New York City mayor. The Trace recently tossed out a headline that was intended to shock the senses and scare America.
WONDER Data
They proclaimed that gun deaths in America topped 45,000 in 2020. Of course, they tied it to the record level of background checks for lawful firearm purchases. That was the extent of the explanation of how they arrived at the figures, which are based on CDC data drawn from the WONDER – or Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research – database.
The Trace reported that 45,222 gun-related deaths were recorded in 2020. It’s a stark number indeed, but it’s a number presented without explanation by the gun control group. The figure actually includes all intent injuries, meaning it captured data that were homicides, accidents, and suicides. When filtering the CDC WONDER data to reflect injury intent being homicide and injury mechanism being firearm that figure is 19,384 deaths, not 45,222, or about 43 percent of what they reported.
This information of over 45,000 deaths in America is meant to scare the uninitiated. There was no mention of the lawlessness that took over much of the country in 2020. Rioting plagued the country in the summer of 2020 at the same time Everytown for Gun Safety was backing calls to defund police. George Soros-backed district attorneys embraced no-bail and catch-and-release policies that put criminals back on the streets within hours of committing their crimes. Everytown backed these plans in the name of racial justice without acknowledging that African-Americans lawfully purchased their own firearms at a rate over 58 percent higher in 2020 than it was in 2019, while Hispanic-Americans purchased guns at a 49 percent higher rate and Asian-Americans bought guns at a 43 percent increased rate during the same time period.
Just this week, newly-installed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg boasted of his soft-on-crime approach while New York City is in the grips of criminals. That includes a purported plan to reduce armed robbery to a petit larceny charge, which is a misdemeanor, provided no victims are seriously injured and there’s “no genuine risk of physical harm.” That takes a 25-year sentence to less than a year and a $1,000 fine.
Ramping Fear
That wasn’t all. The Trace amplified the fear factor by comparing it to deaths caused by vehicles and showing that firearm injury deaths are the 13th leading cause of death, edging out car-related deaths. Nowhere does The Trace call for a ban on cars, but the gun control mouthpiece gladly parrots any line of gun control it finds convenient.
That even applies to suicides. Suicides are tragic and the firearm industry recognizes this. That’s why the firearm industry teamed up with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to create a program for firearm retailers and ranges to provide resources to intervene before a crisis. That partnership now includes the Department of Veterans Affairs to encourage gun owners to have a “brave conversation.”
Conflating criminal misuse of firearms and the mental health issues of suicides might be politically expedient for Everytown’s The Trace. They reported their shocking 45,222 figure by adding in 24,292 suicides recorded in 2020. However, the two issues are unrelated, and treating mental health crises through the lens of gun control doesn’t address the underlying mental health concerns. When gun control groups lump suicides with deaths caused by criminal misuse of firearms, they deny warnings of mental health experts that say the pandemic lockdowns have had an increasing effect on Americans.
Suicide is a mental health issue that isn’t solved by gun control. It’s resolved by levying greater attention and resources to those working to heal from those issues. Treating them as a convenient statistic to advance a political agenda is appalling.
Data without explanation is worse than fuzzy math. It’s the ambient background noise that drowns out a coherent thought. Data manipulation, though, is just a blaring megaphone that’s quickly tuned out.
For More Fake Math News Read:
Not Even ATF Can Verify ATF’s ‘Ghost Gun’ Claims
About The National Shooting Sports Foundation
NSSF is the trade association for the firearm industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of thousands of manufacturers, distributors, firearm retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen’s organizations, and publishers nationwide. For more information, visit nssf.org
who would expect anything other than lies and propaganda from Bloomberg and his minions?
IMO Bloomberg is scared of guns and that people have them also have the power to overthrow his security team.
If saving life was the main agenda for these groups they would go after the big killer, big tobacco….
480,000 Americans and a dog are killed each year by tobacco, 8,000,000 people worldwide.
Tobacco killed more Americans than Covid-19 in both 2020 and 2021.
Tobacco is big business though. It keeps farmers working, hospitals open and filled with doctors and nurses, but mainly keeps the lower income poor and sick.
Perhaps we could sell cigarettes to the Chinese.
most humorous
With the steady decline of smoking in the U.S. over the last 50-60 years, the tobacco companies have greatly increased their marketing (and sales) in all of Asia.
BTW-Do you want to sell China cancer sticks to even out the trade imbalance or the slowly kill them?
Oh of course. The brilliant minds of gun owners at work again. “Hey, you know how bloomberg and every other gun control activist on the planet thoroughly lies, misleads, uses incorrect statistics, and does every trick in the book to inflate the actual toll on society from gun ownership? Yeah that sucks right!?” Also these same people: “I 100% trust all the alcohol and tobacco based death/car crash statistics that are pushed by giant activist corporations who get paid tons of money to stay in business”. Google Geil-Mann Amnesia. You people literally trust sources who are activists down to a… Read more »
unsafe at any speed …….. i had a corvair could do circles around most cars in the snow car was 100 # light in the front tool box fixed that won several car club slalom events beating bmws and Porsches
Yes, the human body isnt meant to travel 45 mph. Blaming auto makers when people die in crashes is like blaming gun manufacturers when people ND into their own face.
Nice to see new people commenting. Welcome aboard!
And there is the difficulty of weeding out the false from the true even when the issues are not agenda driven.
While has was mayor of NYC, Bloom Turd ponied up $125 Million of his own dollars to “fight tobacco worldwide”. https://www.9news.com/article/news/nyc-mayor-bloomberg-putting-his-own-125-million-into-anti-smoking-campaign/73-344470433 You may also remember that he tried to outlaw “oversized” sodas and mandated that all fast food menus display nutritional information. The latter measure was because we aren’t smart enough to decide for ourselves what we eat. Oh, and after that info went up on the menu boards, sales of fast food INCREASED. Bloom Turd doesn’t care about our health or safety, he is an authoritarian control freak that looks down on us as peasants and serfs. I don’t… Read more »
The Trace is not just for Bloomberg. A few industry writers (“experts”) use The Trace to leak info about people and products that disagree with them. Ignore the Trolls and The Trace.
So many big numbers that I am afraid to read them out loud and it is very sad.
However, I have never been good at math and I have never tried to as I understood from the beginning that it is not for me. So, whenever I have a lot of homework, some services help me do my geometry homework quickly and correctly, and also in detail which is very important for me. It saves me a lot of time and energy which I spend doing what I really like and am good at. By the way, thanks for the information!
I just love this sport, and in order to practice it, some services help me do my geometry homework to cope with everything.