When following gun control groups, I've got an axiom. "No gun control group has ever made a statement that is simultaneously original, substantial and true".
You might occasionally get two out of three: something original and true ("our chairman is resigning to pursue other opportunities"). Or perhaps true and substantial ("the Heller decision was a turning point 'gun safety' groups have had a hard time coming back from").
And certainly many things original and substantial - such as the line pushed by politicized public health groups (just coming off their stellar performance during the Covid pandemic) in partnershuip with gun control groups that"firerarms are the leading cause of death among children”.
I's original. It's certainly got heft - hefty enough that President Biden and every "gun safety" proponent parroted it on command for the past three years. To paraphrase Mark Twain, a lie will travel around the world while the truth is eating his avocado toast in the morning. Mainstream media lapped it up.
But...true?
Spectacularly untrue.
And when a lefty claim loses Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "fact-checker", you know it and the public health regime, in its relationship with lefty causes - has got problems.
One example of this problematic partnership was on display when a study was released in 2022 suggesting that firearms had taken over as the “leading cause of death among children” in the United States. Not only did NSSF take apart the flawed study, even The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler deconstructed and fact-checked how the data was cut and manipulated in order to arrive at the conclusion, often repeated by former President Joe Biden, Biden administration officials, gun control activists and media across the country.
Mainstream media ate it up, of course. Sound familiar?
The study’s authors categorized the states, where there was enough data, by three legal groupings of “Strict,” “Permissive” and “Most Permissive,” related to firearm laws. Predictably, they “found” that states with “Strict” firearm regulations post-McDonald v Chicago were associated with less adolescent firearm fatalities.
For the media and gun control allies and politicians, the conclusion is clear: states that respect Second Amendment rights are bad, states with strict gun control are better. The New York Times ran with the story. So too did CNN, never questioning the manipulation of the data, even blindly repeating the original debunked claim ABC News published the story, as did others. It was syndicated and published all across the country countless times.
The problem, of course, was that the study sliced and diced the CDC's raw data to give a misleading but acceptible result:
Problematically, the University of Michigan study takes a broad view of these age groups and compares Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mortality data in 2020. If the University of Michigan researchers were truly confident in their data and the way they interpreted figures from the CDC as the basis for their analysis, why manipulate those numbers?
As the authors point out, total firearm-related deaths for people 1-19, including suicide, homicide, unintentional and undetermined intents, were the leading category at a total of 4,357 deaths, overtaking vehicle-related deaths for the first time. This is an alarming number for anyone to wrap their head around. Upon further analysis, it is clear why the authors included adults in the study. Almost half of the reported deaths, 47.9 percent, originate from 18 to 19-year-old adult victims.
Including adults in a children mortality study is clearly a ruse to pad the firearm-related death numbers for institutional interests. Correcting the parameters to only include children, aged 1 to 17, the leading mechanism of death switches back from firearms to motor vehicles, the historic leading cause of death for this demographic.
And when you measure actual children, ages 17 and below?
Only when adjusting this limited population by the crude rate does the narrative flip. California (“Strict”) and Texas (“Most Permissive”), two states with similarly high populations and diametrically opposing firearm regulations show California as having more adolescent firearm fatalities for the pre- and post-McDonald study period.
Substantial. Original.
But false.
