Anti-Gun Junk ‘Science’ Misleads Ignorant with Deceptive Fallacies

They hardly look like the unbiased observers that true science demands, do they? (AAP Pediatrics/Facebook)

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Firearm sales in the United States broke records at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,” U.S News & World Report notes. “Now, researchers have found that firearm injuries to children also increased during the pandemic’s first two years compared to the preceding year.”

A reasonable conclusion would be that the two occurrences are somehow related. The way this is presented implies that increased gun sales have resulted in more children suffering firearms injuries, or in the parlance of the citizen disarmament lobby, hurt BY guns. Right?

Wrong, of course.

The obvious logical fallacy is that correlation equals causation. It does not. An extreme example to illustrate why is the nonexistent ice cream/rape “connection,” claiming both sales and sexual assaults go up in hotter weather and falsely concluding that one influences the other.

We’re being led down another deceptive path as well with loaded terms. To see what we’re supposed to envision, enter the word “children” in Google’s image search. The results, happy munchkins doing happy munchkin things, are pretty much what everyone is going to expect.

You have to do a deeper dive to find the population being exploited here includes 19-year-olds and that the dramatic increases are happening due to gang activity participated in by minority populations:

“Firearm-related injuries in Black children grew from nearly 31% in 2019 to 40% in 2020 and 48% in 2021. Those cases also showed increases in patients with mental health issues and in injuries where the shooter was a friend.”

Increased firearm sales are extrapolated by increases in background checks. Who thinks teen gangs submit to those? In order for pandemic-related sales to significantly move statistics, the transference from the “legal” to the “illegal” market would need to be almost instantaneous, when in fact, ATF time-to-crime (“the amount of time between the retail sale of a firearm by a federal firearms licensee (FFL) and its recovery by law enforcement”) statistics show a national average period for 2021 of  6.21 years.

True, the Michael Bloomberg-“seeded” agenda “journalism” project The Trace tries desperately to  establish a connection, but after it’s all said and done must concede the relationship is only “suggested” and admit:

“[T]he increase in gun sales is not solely responsible for the increase in short time-to-crime recoveries [and] the number of guns recovered and traced by law enforcement does not always indicate the amount of gun crime in a given year. In other words, factors driving increases in the amount of short-time-crime guns in the ATF’s data may be separate from the factors contributing to gun violence.”

But the implication being pushed is that because people are buying more guns, crime is going up. What’s being ignored is the more likely probability that because crime is going up, more people are buying guns.

“First-time gun buyers continued to flood into firearms stores last year, broadening the once male and white market with women, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics,” the Washington Examiner reported in January. “Retailers reported that concerns about safety helped to drive 5.4 million first-timers into gun stores where many bought more than one gun, and a sizable number also signed up for gun handling classes.”

What we have to understand here is that, like Bloomberg and his The Trace beneficiaries, and like the DSM picking up and parroting this latest in an unending line of narratives designed to separate Americans from their firearms, the “researchers” behind this iteration of the long con are pediatricians. That politicized group, unable to disarm their countrymen, at least wants them to think they’ll be safer locking their guns up separately from their ammunition. (If one tries that on you, hand them a form I co-developed some years back to determine physician qualifications for dispensing such opinions under the guise of certified medical advice and ask them to complete it.)

Hopefully, no one here thinks that’s all they want, do they? As with all gun-grabbers, they’ll take what they can get now and come back for more later, in increments, which is the best argument I can think of against “compromising.” Here’s what else they’re coming for in their demands for “a public safety approach like regulation of motor vehicles”:

  • Catch-22 “mental health screening.” Hence the term “gun nuts.”
  • Socialist wealth transfers in the guise of “community intervention programs.”
  • “Regulations so firearms are regulated for safety like other consumer products, including motor vehicles. National requirements could be established for training, licensing, insurance coverage, and registration of individuals purchasing firearms and requirements for safe storage;”
  • Stupid and dangerous “smart guns” as a precursor to banning “dumb” ones.
  • Ending private sales via registration-enabling “universal background checks.”
  • Mandated “lock up your safety.”
  • Due process-denying “red flag” laws.
  • Tax-funded anti-gun propaganda.

Oh, and someone must not have wanted to list it here, but they also want to ban “assault weapons” and magazines. And they’ll be happy to come up with more demands any time we give in to these.

But no one’s talking about taking your guns.

This is not science—this is propaganda and it’s a gross abuse of public trust by leftist quacks with a naked political agenda. Unfortunately, not being a doctor myself, my opinions are easy for them to reject and condemn as unqualified. So I’ll stipulate my limitations and refer gun owners to a group of physicians more than qualified to dispense sound diagnoses and prescriptions: Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership.  Between them and the outstanding work done by Dr. Miguel A. Faria Jr. at Hacienda Publishing, activist gun owners will have plenty of information to help expose the rights swindles and correct the lies the collectivists are foisting on the public under the false guise of “medical science.”

Now it’s just up to us to use it.


About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.

David Codrea

David Codrea
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Montana454Casull

No such thing as an assault rifle and no such thing as gun violence . The reason everyone bought guns was to protect and defend thier toilet paper. LOL

DIYinSTL

There is such a thing as an assault rifle, e.g. the sturmgewehr, and is well defined in wikipedia. It is the term “assault weapon” that was created by the gun prohibitionists to reference semi-automatic firearms so that their public image would become synonymous with an assault rifle. Unfortunately you have fallen into their trap.

GomeznSA

DIY – ya beat me to it re assault rifles. But M454 is still batting .500 since he nailed the “gun violence” term.
We know who created the first term, which also has a very specific military definition. But no one has been able to track down the propagandist who invented that other bogus term so far.

swmft

sturm…storm .. it is not assault but storming gun ,was made to storm trenches which is a frontal assult

TGP389

Libs love to equate firearms with automobiles, but I don’t recall an entry in the Bill of Rights regarding autos.

GomeznSA

TGP and yet they always ignore just how many crimes are committed using automobiles (and trucks!) every year nor how many are stolen in spite of how visible they are.

Boz

Dopey IiberaIs beIieve aII kinds of faIse things, such as buIIets being abIe to fIy on a curved horizontal trajectory Iike in movies such as WANTED (Morgan Freeman) and MATRIX movies.

Boz

IiberaIs Iive in fantasy worId. l guess that expIains why 99% of attendees at COMICON are IiberaI basement dweIIers.

Finnky

Sure you can curve bullet trajectories sideways. All you need to do is create, install and manage a black hole somewhere to the side of the trajectory – while avoiding having the black hole consume the entire earth. Just a neat little science experiment – right?

TGP389

They can, in hurricane force winds… LOL

Mack

“This is not science—this is propaganda …”

These evil Leftists bear false witness.

They seek to inflame, not inform.



swmft

satins foot soldiers

GomeznSA

Misinformation and disinformation – as well as flat out lying – are the stock in trade for liberals, regardless of the topic. It is ‘almost’ as if truth to them is like a cross or daylight is to a vampire.

StLPro2A

As Gomer always exclaimed, “SURPRISE, SURPRISE!!!” Accuracy and correct analysis are not the anti-2A scumbags’ agenda.