CNN is clearly excited to announce the release of a new study on gun death statistics from a medical journal covering trauma surgery and acute care. We’ve seen plenty of these studies before, but this one puts a couple of new spins on how the results are tabulated that are sure to be popular with the gun-grabbing crowd. One of these twists is found in the headline at CNN, where it is breathlessly announced that gun deaths have exceeded deaths from automobile accidents in the United States in the period from 2009 to 2018. (Yes, the data they are using is a bit dated.) They also don’t simply count the total number of deaths, but add in the “years of potential life lost due to firearm deaths.” The authors of the study boldly conclude that the cause for all of this carnage shouldn’t be attributed to criminals – perish the thought – but rather to “the right to bear arms” and the availability of guns to people who are “demanding access to firearms.” Of course, as with most of these studies, the number of blatantly deceptive and frankly inaccurate conclusions turns the entire report into a muddled mess.

Firearm deaths have overtaken car crashes are the leading cause of death by trauma in the US, according to a new study.

In 2017, there were 1.44 million years of potential life lost due to firearm deaths, edging out that of motor vehicle crashes (1.37 million years), according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Trauma Surgery and Acute Care Open. And that trend continued in 2018.

Those numbers are based on data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2009 and 2018, the most recent year for which data was available.

You can read the full article at the link, but let’s just take a moment to highlight some of the real problems with this report. To their credit, rather than trying to claim that all murders and homicides are attributable to guns, they are at least honest enough to admit that the majority of all gun deaths are suicides. Of course, when people like the leaders of Everytown for Gun Safety (who released their own separate study that’s woven into the article) try to argue that the suicide rate should be factored into gun control questions, the debate immediately turns to mush. People who are bound and determined to end their lives will find a way to do it. Also, guns are only the number one suicide option chosen by men. Women prefer poison.

The study concludes that in 2017, there were 1.44 million “years of potential life lost due to firearm deaths” as opposed to 1.37 million years for automobile accidents. Man, that makes for a splashy title, doesn’t it? I’m shocked they didn’t use it in the headline. But how did they calculate those “years of potential life lost?” They took the age when each person died and subtracted it from 80, even though the average life expectancy in the United States is actually 78.7 and has dropped a slight bit further lately. So right off the bat you can take the study’s total and subtract 2.3 years per person from it.

But the badness doesn’t stop there. The report then veers away from suicides to homicides and breathlessly reports that “the majority of homicide-related firearm deaths were among Black men.” They then use the same formula, factoring in the reality that most homicide victims are younger than those who commit suicide. But they completely ignore the fact that the average life expectancy for Black American males is not 80, but actually 72 years, so you can throw that figure out the window as well.

Would you care to take a guess as to what is never mentioned anywhere in the entire article? They make no distinction between homicides committed using legally purchased and owned firearms and those committed using black market guns by people who have never filled out a registration form or completed a background check. If you take the most recent FBI estimates of those figures into account, murders using legally owned weapons are dwarfed by deaths caused by blunt objects or fists. (Be sure to donate to my new organization, Everytown for Baseball Bat Safety.)

You can expect to see this study being cited on the news this week as another reason to ban guns, assuming they have time to break away from the Ukraine news. And when you do see them do it, just keep these realities regarding their study tucked in your back pocket.