{"id":100158,"date":"2024-02-18T15:53:56","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T21:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=100158"},"modified":"2024-02-18T15:53:56","modified_gmt":"2024-02-18T21:53:56","slug":"100158","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=100158","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Even The Washington Post Concedes the Biden Administration\u2019s Favorite Gun Control Lie Is, In Fact, a Lie.<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a \u201cThe Pigs are Flying\u201d moment after\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>, the newspaper that has never found a gun\u00a0control policy it did not fawn over, took up a gun\u00a0control claim the Biden administration loves to repeat and determined it to be false.<\/p>\n

To be clear, Glenn Kessler\u2019s\u00a0The Fact Checker<\/em>\u00a0couldn\u2019t bring itself to award any Pinocchios \u2013 not one \u2013 to the false claim, but its thorough breakdown and analysis of the claim left nothing misunderstood. Saying that \u201cGun\u00a0violence is the leading cause of death for children\u201d is patently \u201cNot True.\u201d<\/p>\n

We won\u2019t hold our collective breaths for The White House to issue a formal statement acknowledging their repeated lie. Instead, we\u2019re assuming President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, White House officials and gun control activists will simply continue repeating the false claim. And notwithstanding The Washington Post\u2019s fact checking, this lie will likely continue to be uncritically reported as \u201cfact\u201d by the mainstream media.<\/p>\n

Still, having The Washington Post take up the claim and acknowledge it is false should be deserving of at least a little praise.<\/p>\n

Favorite False Claim<\/h4>\n

President Biden has repeated the claim often as he pushes again and again for more gun\u00a0control. He began his campaign for the presidency in 2019 by calling firearm manufacturers \u201cthe enemy.\u201d He now uses the \u201cfirearms are the leading cause of death for children\u201d to push ever more restrictions on the Second Amendment while saying little to nothing about holding violent criminals accountable, let alone calling out soft-on-crime prosecutors who let those same criminals back out on the streets to commit more crimes.<\/p>\n

Vice President Harris recited the false claim in two recent events in North Carolina and in Washington, D.C. The White House used the false claim as a lede in a\u00a0recent press release<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0announcing new White House unilateral gun\u00a0control executive actions.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no telling how often it has been repeated by U.S. Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, governors and any number of other local elected officials and gun\u00a0control activists pushing the claim as a reason why more gun\u00a0control is needed.<\/p>\n

CBS Evening News<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0ran a segment repeating the claim. So did\u00a0ABC News<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Repeating the claim doesn\u2019t change the fact that it is false.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you focus only on children \u2014 17 and younger \u2014 motor vehicle deaths (broadly defined) still rank No. 1, as they have for six decades,\u201d The Washington Post\u00a0reported<\/a><\/strong>. \u201cIn the interest of accuracy, it would be better for White House officials to refer to children and teens when citing these reports. When all motor vehicle accidents are counted, then motor vehicle deaths continue to exceed firearm deaths for children \u2014 defined as people under age 18 \u2014 whether or not infants are included.\u201d Better? How about true.<\/p>\n

Debunked Immediately<\/h4>\n

The claim in question came about as a result of a\u00a0faulty study published by the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention in April 2022<\/a><\/strong>. That study included Americans aged 18 and 19 years old \u2013 adults \u2013 in the data set as well as manipulated motor vehicle crash data to assert firearms became the \u201cleading cause of death among children and adolescents\u201d in 2020. NSSF debunked the study when it was published in April 2022.<\/p>\n

In his dissection of the misleading study, NSSF\u2019s Salam Fatohi summarized the ruse,\u00a0writing<\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cSince at least the 1990\u2019s, gun\u00a0control advocates have used this trick of including adults in the data set to inflate the number of \u2018children\u2019 to evoke an emotional reaction from readers of these studies to sway public opinion in favor of their agenda.\u201d That\u2019s exactly why the claim is still repeated so often today.<\/p>\n

In The Washington Post analysis, The Fact Checker even included a White House spokesperson admitting this was their angle all along and that The Washington Post regularly uses the same tactic.<\/p>\n

\u201cA White House official said it is standard practice for such research reports to include 18- and 19-year-olds in the data. He noted that The Washington Post, in writing about one of these reports, used \u2018children\u2019 in the headline, even though the report covered gun\u00a0deaths of children and adolescents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spreading the Truth<\/h4>\n

Following The Washington Post\u2019s admission that the claim is false and the data had been manipulated, a handful of news sites took notice and highlighted the debunking.<\/p>\n

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms posted about the Fact Check, noting \u201cWashington Post: Guns AREN\u2019T the Leading Cause of Death for Kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAmong the left, the Post is still one of the gold-standard publications that can and should be listened to. The Washington Post declined to give any Pinocchios, which is what they use to rate claims, but they do a pretty good job of dismantling the study cited by anti-gun\u00a0politicians like the vice president,\u201d Knighton\u00a0wrote<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cWhether someone wants to take our word about the issues with the study, though, is now irrelevant. It\u2019s entirely likely they will listen to The Washington Post about guns and child deaths. They won\u2019t, however, like what they see.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Hot Air, John Sexton\u00a0wrote about it as well<\/strong><\/a>. \u201cIt has become commonplace for the White House and left wing commentators to claim that gun\u00a0violence is the number one cause of death for children,\u201d Sexton wrote. \u201cUltimately, Kessler doesn\u2019t give this misleading claim a rating\u2026 It would also be nice if fact-checkers and reporters would point out how carefully massaged the data behind these claims are when the claims are made instead of waiting most of a year to explain it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dan Zimmerman at Shooting News Weekly also\u00a0covered<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0The Washington Post\u2019s admission. \u201cAfter much prefatory throat-clearing about the amount of \u2018gun\u00a0violence\u2019 in this country\u2026, Kessler finally concludes with this gem when it comes time to award the Pinocchios: \u2018In the interest of accuracy, it would be better for White House officials to refer to children and teens when citing these reports\u2019\u2026 It must have physically hurt him to write even that much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The firearm industry takes pride in our efforts to use data and facts in our initiatives to reduce unintended firearm tragedies as much as possible and to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not possess them. We\u2019ve been gratified to play a role in having that number\u00a0reach historic lows<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0in the past years and will continue to help reduce firearm tragedies even lower, especially among America\u2019s children.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration and The White House ought to ditch the junk science lies and instead focus on\u00a0Real Solutions<\/strong>\u00ae<\/a>\u00a0to reduce criminal firearm violence. After all, President Biden\u00a0complimented the firearm industry\u2019s efforts in the past<\/a><\/strong>, that is before deeming the industry \u201cthe enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even The Washington Post Concedes the Biden Administration\u2019s Favorite Gun Control Lie Is, In Fact, a Lie. It was a \u201cThe Pigs are Flying\u201d moment after\u00a0The Washington Post, the newspaper that has never found a gun\u00a0control policy it did not fawn over, took up a gun\u00a0control claim the Biden administration loves to repeat and determined … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goobermint","category-mendacity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100159,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100158\/revisions\/100159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}