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
When the Medical Community Lies: American Academy of Pediatrics Fudge The Numbers on 'Kids' and Guns. . .With an Assist from ThinkProgress :: 04/05/2015
Pediatrics (the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics) is at it again; ginning up scary numbers by twisting the definitions of poor simple American English words all out of shape. And the civilian disarmament advocacy crowd (in this case ThinkProgress.org) are taking their distortions and running with them while doing their best to avoid pointing out the misdirection and distortions.
Witness Tara Culp-Ressler’s piece at TP titled “10,000 Kids Are Injured Or Killed By Guns Each Year In The U.S.”.
Ms. Hyphenated starts by sounding the alarm:
Injuries from firearms send an estimated 7,000 kids to the ER every year, and an additional 3,000 children die from gunshot wounds before they can get to a hospital, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.
Now, your average everyday American English speaker, if asked to define the word “kid” would probably reply, “a child.” If asked for an age range for who might be considered kids, they would probably think elementary or maybe middle school age. Most would agree that pre-adolescent (13 and under) would not be stretching the definition too far at all.
Oddly enough, however, through her entire 400+ word piece, Tara never once mentions what age range this SHOCKING NEW STUDY covers. You have to actually go to the study itself to find out that they are talking about “children younger than 20.”
Doctors are pointing to the new data as further evidence of the serious public health toll that gun violence takes on America’s youth.
First of all when anti-gun types use the term “gun violence” they don’t mean it in the way that most people do, i.e. the result of someone using a gun to deliberately harm another. The CDC’s WISQARS non-fatal injury page includes “violence-related” assaults, legal intervention (i.e. police shootings) and self-harm. But what the heck, let’s go with this and see where that takes us. Over the 13 years from 2001 – 2013 (the latest data available on WISQARS), what sort of “public health toll” have guns taken on our *choke* youth, as opposed to other causes of injury?
So according to the CDC’s data more “kids” are being hospitalized due to car crashes, falls, beatings, stabbings and poisonings than shootings. In fact it looks like falls caused an average of 6.8 times as many hospitalizations as did shootings and car crashes caused 4.7 times as many. Where is the angst over slip-and-falls and piss-poor driving?
Tara then brings out the big guns, so to speak:
“This study reinforces what we know from the mortality data,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told NBC News. “We have an extraordinary health burden in our youth associated with firearms injuries.”
What about the 4.7 times greater health burden that’s associated with cars, Dan? Why aren’t you screeching about that? Perhaps because everyone is familiar with the benefits that cars bring to society, and are willing to accept the associated costs because they are outweighed by those perceived benefits. And this is part of the inherent dishonesty with all of these “studies” churned out by civilian disarmament advocates and their fellow-travelers; they do the cost benefit analysis without looking at the benefits.
Even Drs. Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig (both noted anti-gun researchers) admitted in their 1997 study that there were approximately 1,460,000 defensive gun uses a year in the US.
Tara then piles on more evidence of a growing problem:
The number of kids being killed by guns in the U.S. has been steadily rising over the past several decades, and the issue has captured headlines as the number of school shootings has intensified.
Steadily rising? Really? Let’s see what the CDC’s number say about that.
Hmm, that doesn’t look like a steady increase to me; in fact it sort of looks like firearm deaths peaked and then started dropping right about the time more and more states started going “shall-issue.” But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Wait, maybe Tara meant to say that the rate of homicides has been going up?
Nope. The rate has been declining for 20 years, too. I guess Tara is just horribly misinformed. Or lying. But there’s more.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) estimates that firearms are one of the top three causes of death among children …
Well, going back to our handy-dandy WISQARS website with their Leading Cause of Death report generator we find …
Oops! Looks like someone is factually challenged. Again! Even if we add together the Unintentional Injury, Homicide and Suicide firearms numbers for 1 – 13 year olds, we only get 821 + 2,564 + 572 = 3,957 which would put guns at #6, between heart disease and influenza. Maybe Tara was told that no math was involved when she started her writing career.
But the misinformation doesn’t stop there:
… firearms are one of the top three causes of death among children killing twice as many kids as cancer does.
Oops again. See that little box at #2 for the 1 – 13 year-olds that says Malignant Neoplasms? For you non-medical-jargonese speakers out there that means cancer. So not only do guns not kill twice as many kids as cancer, in fact cancer kills more than four times as many children as do guns.
And I probably shouldn’t have implied that Tara’s lying. She’s apparently just a mindless drone regurgitating the pap she’s fed by others. It’s the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics that’s doing most of the language-distorting, statistics-doctoring prevarication here. And here’s why. In order to get firearms to be one of the top three causes of death, they just had to limit themselves to “children” ages 15 to 19 (which happens to include lots of urban gang violence). Not to mention 18- and 19-year-olds who aren’t “kids” at all…by anyone’s definition.
Fortunately all is not lost, because Tara Two-Names has some “concrete policy solutions” to “address this issue:”
Webster suggests raising the legal age to purchase a handgun to 21, since research has demonstrated that there’s a peak in gun violence among youth between the ages of 18 and 20.
And these violent “youths” committing murder in droves are all 18 and older and doing their shooting with legally purchased firearms? Yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.
The AAP has also pushed for expanded background checks and safe storage to ensure that guns aren’t falling into the wrong hands.
Again Tara, do you really think these criminal “youths” are going to be dissuaded from murdering other human beings because some citizen had to go through a background check…before their gun was stolen?
And more states could move to make adults criminally liable for allowing kids to have access to guns.
And Gary the Gangbanger is going to give two hoots about whether he’s violating “safe storage” or “child access” gun laws when he give little Johnny the Junior Banger a piece with which to make his bones? Not only is the AAP’s official journal utterly divorced from truthfulness, but it seems to be utterly divorced from reality as well.
