CNN held a town hall Wednesday, and I gather the violence-enabling victim disarmament lies were flying. I didn’t watch it but per reports, the usual long debunked arguments were still trotted out.
Gropin’ Joe Biden came up with the bogus First Amendment comparison.
“[N]o amendment is absolute. None of you can stand up on the First Amendment, free speech, and yell ‘fire’ in here [or] you’ll be arrested.”
I found that particularly annoying since I just wasted virtual ink schooling a lying professor on that very subject.
“You pretend that lying and threatening are the First Amendment equivalents of the Second Amendment right to POSSESS a tool.”
Hey, Biden; did you get a First Amendment license before you spoke at that town hall? Did you undergo a prior restraint on your right to speech by preemptively proving your innocence before stepping up to that microphone? Did you show the moderator your government issued photo ID and fill out a form for the government’s use, remembering to tell them your very race?
Not to be mendaciously outdone, Mini Mike Bloomberg pulled this out of… somewhere.
“You don’t want to have guns. If you have a gun in your house you’re something like 22 times as likely to get killed with a gun.”
He didn’t cite a source for that, but “22” tells us he’s thinking of the insanely bad Kellerman 1998 paper.
Kellerman came up with that ratio by ignoring all non-lethal defensive gun uses (DGU), and lumping in all lethal non-defensive deaths — firearm or not — together (there were issues with the counties he chose to represent the US, as well). That should have rated nonacceptance right there, and certainly retraction once it was pointed out.
But really, this should have been another clue:
“Homicide claims the lives of approximately 24,000 Americans each year, making it the 11th leading cause of death among all age groups, the 2nd leading cause of death among all people 15 to 24 years old, and the leading cause of death among male African Americans 15 to 34 years old.”
1980 was the peak year for homicides in the US, with a rate of 10.2/100K, or about 23,107 homicides. We’ve never hit 24,000, much average it. The 2018 rate was 5.9/100K. (WISQARS only goes back to 1999, the year after the Kellerman paper, but there were 16,889 homicides that year. The rate given for 1998 is 6.3/100K; which would work out to 17336 homicides. Kellerman inflated his claim by over 38%.)
Sorry, Mike; busted.
For those curious as to the actual ratio of DGUs to homicides, that’s a tough call. Based on personal experience, I don’t think the majority of DGUs are ever reported. But the anti-gun rights group Violence Policy Center looked at reported numbers and estimated 338,700 DGUs in 2007-2011, an average of 67,740/year.
They found 58,450 firearm homicides in that same period, an average of 11,690.
So rather than being guns being 22 times more likely to be used in murder as Bloomberg claimed, they’re 5.8 times more likely to be used defensively. And that is using VPC’s laughably low estimate of DGUs. As in the three incidents in personal experience, most are never reported to police. Using VPC numbers, let’s put DGUs at 270,960 per year.
In another blatant lie, Biden also claimed there 150 million firearm deaths since 2007 (47.5% of the population!). That would average 11,538,462. Typically, no more than 40% would be homicides, so… 4,615,384 “homicides” by Creepy Uncle Joe’s weird estimate. I wonder. That would yield a DGU: homicide ratio of 1:17. Maybe that’s the red-sky universe where Bloomberg and Kellerman found their fantastically out-of-this world WAG. I do not think Joe Biden is a reliable primary source, guys.
[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited, and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]
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