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Right Wing Gun Nuts Manipulate Data, Falsely Claim Hammers and Clubs More Deadly
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-gun-nuts-manipulate-data-falsely-claim-hammers-and-clubs-more-deadlyRight-wing NRA "talking point"
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Awr Hawkins looks at murder rates across the country and declares he's found the new weapon gun control advocates should try to ban: hammers. "For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle."
How strange, you might think. Can this be true? Well, as "The Slog" notes in a neat little piece of debunking, that's because our friendly right-wing conspiracy lover is talking about rifles, and only rifles. Not handguns, shotguns or other kinds of weapons. "But of course, being a Breitbart writer, Hawkins blithely ignores the other 8,260 firearm-related homicides in 2011 attributed to shotguns, handguns, and other unidentified guns."
That makes our friend at Breitbart.com one of the most tortured twisters of statistics I've ever encountered. A quick look at the data reveals that out of 12,664 total victims on the chart, 8,583 were killed by firearms. That's basically two-thirds, more than any other kind of weapon.
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It also seems fairly obvious that if you must rely on false equivalencies and incomplete data to argue that guns are essentially safe, you have no business entering a high school debate on gun control, let alone conversing with adults on the topic.
Awr Hawkins looks at murder rates across the country and declares he's found the new weapon gun control advocates should try to ban: hammers. "For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle."
How strange, you might think. Can this be true? Well, as "The Slog" notes in a neat little piece of debunking, that's because our friendly right-wing conspiracy lover is talking about rifles, and only rifles. Not handguns, shotguns or other kinds of weapons. "But of course, being a Breitbart writer, Hawkins blithely ignores the other 8,260 firearm-related homicides in 2011 attributed to shotguns, handguns, and other unidentified guns."
That makes our friend at Breitbart.com one of the most tortured twisters of statistics I've ever encountered. A quick look at the data reveals that out of 12,664 total victims on the chart, 8,583 were killed by firearms. That's basically two-thirds, more than any other kind of weapon.
- Snip -
It also seems fairly obvious that if you must rely on false equivalencies and incomplete data to argue that guns are essentially safe, you have no business entering a high school debate on gun control, let alone conversing with adults on the topic.
Yet we see the same old tired and thoroughly debunked right-wing NRA talking points trotted out time and time again from people who claim that a gun is just an "inanimate object," yet have the audacity to equate being pro-gun with being pro-choice. There is absolutely nothing Liberal about carrying a lethal weapon in public, and the so-called "pro-gun" lobby is overwhelmingly made up of right-wing extremists (see the Bundy "militia"
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