PA Bill Number: HB335

Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.

Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...

Last Action: Removed from table

Last Action Date: May 1, 2024

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Are anti-gunners tossing rocks in glass houses? :: 07/04/2015

An e-mail yesterday from the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility (WAGR) complained about “deception” and “outright lies” told by the so-called “gun lobby,” ironically two days after the Washington Post called out a Connecticut senator for using misleading data about school shootings from Everytown for Gun Safety, and after a CNN poll released Tuesday showed shrinking support for Barack Obama’s gun policy.

It also came on the same day a prominent California anti-gunner pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that included a gun trafficking scheme. Former State Sen. Leland Yee will be off to the pokey when he is sentenced in October. This begs the question: Are gun prohibitionists throwing rocks in glass houses?

Monday’s Washington Post Fact Checker column raked Democrat U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy for asserting the other day that since Sandy Hook in December 2012, “there has been one school shooting on average per week.” It appears to be a bogus assertion based on what the newspaper said is “a report by Everytown for Gun Safety,” the group founded by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

To its credit, the newspaper recalled, “A version of this claim circulated after the June 2014 incident in Oregon in which a high school freshman armed with an assault rifle shot and killed a student and injured a teacher. President Obama and other gun-control advocates had said then that there had been at least 74 school shootings between Sandy Hook and the Oregon shooting.”

Last year, PolitiFact Oregon – a column appearing on the Portland Oregonian website – challenged the claim by Everytown following the Reynolds High School shooting that, at the time, 74 school shootings had occurred since Sandy Hook. CNN also weighed in at the time, finding only 15 such incidents that it could say were comparable to Sandy Hook.

This time around, the Washington Post did some math and determined that if Murphy and Everytown were right, there have been approximately 126 school shootings since the Newtown tragedy. As Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Bellevue-based Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms observed in a Wednesday press release, “One school shooting is a tragedy, but to broadly define such incidents in order to pad the numbers is simply dishonest.”

And “broadly defining such incidents” appears to be exactly what the gun prohibition lobby has done, according to the WaPo Fact Checker. It found that Everytown “uses a broad definition of school shooting: when a firearm is discharged on school or campus grounds at K-12 schools and colleges.” How broad?

According to Fact Checker, “Of the 126 cases, 25 were attempted or committed suicides” and, “There were at least 10 incidents that were similar to shooting in Newtown, with one shooter opening fire with the intent to kill or injure multiple victims. A separate incident in June 2015 involved a couple that shot and killed a cat on a school campus, but had told law enforcement officials they would have shot students if it were ‘God’s will.’ We did not include that in the list of 10 incidents.”

In its e-mail blast today, WAGR announced the creation of “Gun Lobby Watch.” The group says, “It’s time to call out the gun lobby’s lies” and “set the record straight.” They might start by cleaning the windows in their own glass house because this business about the number of school shootings since Sandy Hook has been floating around for a long time, despite last year’s refutation by PolitiFact Oregon and CNN.

Speaking of CNN, their poll conducted June 26-28 from among 1,017 adults revealed that 53 percent disapprove of President Obama’s gun policies, while only 42 percent approve. But there is a significant racial divide in that 79 percent of blacks approve and only 19 percent disapprove of his gun policies, while only 33 percent of whites approve of his gun control efforts and 61 percent disapprove.

Now, with the Washington Post weighing in on the school shooting claim – giving Murphy’s assertion a devastating “four Pinocchios,” a reference to how the cartoon character’s nose grew every time he told a lie – it’s the anti-gun crowd that may want to stop throwing rocks. Public support has slipped for the president’s policies, and that just might carry over into the entire battle over gun rights versus gun control.

Protect Our Gun Rights (POGR), the Evergreen State Second Amendment umbrella group that opposed Initiative 594 last year, also issued a release quoting Gottlieb, who chaired that organization during the campaign. What they said last year about the measure being unenforceable seems to be coming true, along with the assertion that it is really just a scheme to expand the state’s pistol registry.

Gottlieb recalled that when the questionable data was first challenged last year, “the estimate should have been dismissed forever as bogus. But instead, this canard has assumed the status of urban myth.”

His assessment, based on the WaPo Fact Checker’s analysis, is that the gun prohibition lobby has “essentially been cooking the books.” While that newspaper aimed its criticism at Sen. Murphy and other lawmakers, it could have also chided some of its press colleagues for being all-too-willing to accept Everytowns’ estimates as gospel. Their explanation could have equally applied to reporters.

“Lawmakers have a responsibility,” the newspaper said, “to check out the facts in the reports they use, especially ones that come from advocacy groups. If they are aware there are definitions that are disputed, or that are defined in other ways depending on who uses them, it is incumbent on lawmakers to clarify exactly what they are talking about and not mislead the public. In particular, lawmakers should rely more on official government statistics, such as from the FBI, rather than misleading metrics cobbled together by interest groups.”

Musing over the story in his Bellevue office, Gottlieb had this observation: “This isn’t the first time a newspaper has called Everytown on this claim and it should cause the press and the public to wonder what other misleading claims the gun ban crowd has been making.”

YEE PLEADS GUILTY: On the subjects of irony and deception, former California State Sen. Leland Yee, a perennial anti-gun Democrat once honored by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence for his gun control work, pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court to racketeering in a case that involved “promises of gun running and more,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Yee was indicted early last year after an investigation into corruption that included allegations of gun and drug trafficking, liquor smuggling, money laundering, bribery and other crimes including a conspiracy to commit murder for hire involving Yee’s political advisor Keith Jackson, former president of the San Francisco School Board, and Jackson’s son, Brandon. Both of the Jacksons also entered guilty pleas yesterday to racketeering charges.

At the time the indictments were first reported in early 2014, CCRKBA’s Gottlieb called the accusations against Yee “staggering.” He told The Gun Mag that, if convicted, Yee would be revealed as “easily the biggest hypocrite on gun control to walk the halls of the capitol in Sacramento, if not the entire United States.”

Yee was alleged to have been a willing participant in a proposed effort to illegally import automatic weapons and shoulder-fired missiles, which was part of a larger scheme to raise campaign funds in exchange for political favors. But one of the people Yee apparently talked to was an undercover federal agent. At the time he was running for California secretary of state, but after the indictment, he dropped out of the race. The Los Angeles Times noted that he still received more than 300,000 votes.

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