Category: Propaganda O’ The Day

Tracing Spurious Claims

Since leading anti-gun researchers acknowledged no connection between the 2020 surge in firearms sales and violence, unscrupulous anti-gun advocates must cite underwhelming statistics as meaningful evidence.

That’s what The Trace did, in an article written in collaboration with FiveThirtyEight. We’d expect a more sophisticated analysis from FiveThirtyEight, but this is what Nate Silver’s outfit gave the world:

“New Data Suggests a Connection Between Pandemic Gun Sales and Increased Violence.”

Ominous, right? The operative word here is “suggests.” They can’t use anything stronger because this is a very rudimentary analysis – there is no identification of causality. There is no actual statistical test to even indicate an association between the two variables.

Bloomberg’s activist-journalists looked at ATF reports showing the number of firearms traced broken out by the time between retail sale and tracing. They report that the number of firearms traced within a year of retail sale increased significantly from 2019 to 2020. The so-called journalists try to humanize the data by pointing to a pair of examples, developing the strongest emotional levers they could muster. Those cases are, of course, awful but are unlikely to be representative of all such traces.

So, the number of firearms traced within a year increased in a year in which the number of all guns sold increased. That seems proportional. The Trace covers this point, too: the ratio of guns traced within seven months of retail sale to all gun sales has increased annually since 2013. That sounds much more dramatic than the proportion increased from about 0.11% to 0.3% from 2013 through 2020.

That is eleven-one-hundredths of a percent to three-tenths of a percent. Naturally, that means that 99.7% of firearms are not traced within seven months of their acquisition.

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Not one thing SloJoe wants would have stropped that

Biden Uses Sandy Hook Anniversary to Call for More Gun Control

Joe Biden put gun control back on the front burner, using the ninth anniversary of the Sandy Hook mass shooting to call for stricter gun control laws, according to CNN.

Calling the shooting—committed by a disturbed young man who murdered his mother and took her legally-purchased firearms to the school in Newtown, Conn.—an “unconscionable act of violence,” Biden said he wants the U.S. Senate to pass three pieces of legislation. One expands background checks, another would prohibit gun ownership by “abusers,” and the third would reportedly create “community violence intervention” programs under the “Build Back Better” program.

CNN’s report portrayed Biden’s wish list as “limited scope” measures. But the president’s gun control agenda is hardly that. It includes a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and original capacity magazines. There would be waiting periods and other hoops through which law-abiding gun owners would have to jump while criminals would continue ignoring the laws and remain fairly well-armed.

This comes as Rasmussen Reports a new daily presidential tracking poll showing Biden’s popularity remains at a low, with only 21 percent of likely voters strongly approving of his job performance. On the other side, 47 percent of likely voters “strongly disapprove” of his job performance.

An unidentified “senior White House official” admitted to reporters that none of the president’s agenda items are enough “to fully solve this problem.” So Biden wants Congress to act.

That may not be likely with the midterm elections on the horizon in 2022. There is lots of speculation Republicans may capture at least one house of Congress, and possibly both the House and Senate, effectively slamming a door on Biden’s agenda.

For the present, CNN noted anti-gun Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is hopeful “negotiations could resume in the coming weeks to produce some bipartisan reform.” But what does that mean? When CNN talks about “gun reform” and “gun safety,” they’re talking about gun control. Grassroots gun rights activists call that “camo-speak,” because it camouflages what gun control advocates are actually seeking.

The White House “official” said Biden is still looking for a nominee to head the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Earlier this year, Biden had to embarrassingly withdraw the nomination of former ATF agent David Chipman because of his advocacy of gun bans and tighter gun regulation. Gun rights activists from across the country flooded Capitol Hill with opposition to Chipman.

Meanwhile, Biden is under fire for being unable to handle the current crime crisis in major cities, with violent crime and homicides on the rise. According to Fox News, “At least 12 major cities, including New York, have already set historical murder records in 2021. Robberies and assaults are also on the rise, and retailers in major cities across the country are reporting an uptick in organized smash-and-grab crimes during the busy holiday shopping season.”

A ‘study’ using interviews of sixteen seasoned citizens and thirteen medicos and the researchers use it as a venue to merely regurgitate their previous anti-gun views.

And just to point out:
Read These Taxpayer Funded Antigun Research Projects
The Centers for Disease Control recently announced the projects funded by more than $7.8 million dollars to “Prevent Firearm-Related Violence and Injuries.”
Let’s take a look at some of the projects receiving CDC funding:
Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar of the University of Washington will receive $1.5 million over three years for a project that “will identify the context, antecedents, and consequences of handgun carrying among adolescents who reside in rural communities in order to inform culturally appropriate and community-specific interventions.” “This project is intended to inform the development, adoption, and refinement of non-punitive prevention approaches to address factors that influence handgun carrying and reduce the burden of firearm-related injury among youth in rural communities.”

This project would seemingly build on Rowhani-Rahbar’s previous work on the topic through an NIH grant, and he has published dozens of articles and studies on firearms and firearms-related policies. He is the Co-Director of the Firearm Injury and Policy Research Program at Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center at the University of Washington.

Gun for young people are baaaaaad.
Guns for old people are baaaaaaad.
Guns are baaaaaaad!

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Should There Be ‘Gun Retirement’ for the Elderly?

MONDAY, May 17, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Just as some elderly drivers need to give up their car keys, older gun owners may eventually face “firearm retirement.” And a preliminary study suggests they are open to the idea.

In focus-group interviews with older gun owners, researchers found that many had considered putting limits on their firearm access — though they usually hadn’t yet laid out plans for when and how.

It’s an important issue, given that 40% of older Americans live in a home with a gun, said lead researcher Laura Prater of Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The concern, she said, is that a significant number of those seniors have or will develop dementia or major depression. If they have easy access to a firearm, they could harm themselves, accidentally or intentionally.

No one wants to wrest firearms from the hands of older adults who can use them safely, Prater said.

The point, she stressed, is that gun owners, family members and health care providers should talk about the future — including what should happen with household firearms once a person’s health makes access a hazard.

“We should be treating this like a normal conversation,” Prater said, “just like you plan for other things, like driving, retirement or finances.”

A big takeaway from the interviews was that gun owners accepted the concept of firearm “retirement.”

“Older adults want to be responsible gun owners,” Prater said.

“What they weren’t open to,” she added, “was someone else making the decision for them.”

That means planning is key — before, say, early-stage dementia advances. One place to start, Prater said, is with a “firearm inventory,” where the older adult and family members account for all firearms in the home.

Many owners, Prater noted, have multiple firearms, and family members or other caregivers are not always aware of them.

Some older adults might want a “transition period,” she said, starting with disposing of firearms that are not being used. (Local laws vary on how to do that, Prater noted.)

The current findings are based on interviews with 16 older gun owners, as well as 13 geriatrics specialists.

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