{"id":103785,"date":"2024-08-20T20:21:36","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T01:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=103785"},"modified":"2024-08-20T20:21:36","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T01:21:36","slug":"103785","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=103785","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Rosen: Surgeon General misleads on gun violence<\/a><\/p>\n

In a July speech advocating for more stringent gun control, President Biden claimed that \u201cMore children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death.\u201d That\u2019s surely an alarming and tragic statistic but a very misleading one.\u00a0 The use of the word \u201cchildren\u201d is deceptive, emotionally bringing to mind infants, toddlers and kindergartners. Legally, a \u201cchild\u201d can be as old as 17, or even 20 in some states, including those with felony convictions and gangbangers in inner cities, like Chicago.<\/p>\n

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control, \u201cIn 2022, Black children and teens were 20 times as likely to die from firearm homicides compared to their white counterparts.\u201d\u00a0 And the great majority of those deaths are black on black shootings by teenage gangsters, not little kids. And statistically, the kinds of diseases that fatally afflict the elderly in great numbers are rare among youngsters, skewing the causes of death toward guns.<\/p>\n

Recently, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, issued a public declaration that our country is experiencing a \u201cgun violence crisis.\u201d\u00a0 Conversely, according to the FBI, nationwide homicides decreased by 13% in 2023 despite public perception to the contrary as reflected in a November 2023 Gallup poll that found 77% of Americans believed crime was increasing.<\/p>\n

That apparent discrepancy can be explained by terminology, definitions and spin, especially skewing the impact of suicide, which the Surgeon General conveniently includes in his definition of gun violence.\u00a0 Suicides with the use of a gun account for 56% of all gun deaths. But an act of violence is something you inflict on someone else, not on yourself. Let\u2019s say you\u2019re suffering from severe depression or unbearable pain from a terminal illness, and you rationally chose to end your life, this could be viewed as an act of self-compassion.\u00a0 It\u2019s not gun violence. If you hanged yourself, instead, would that be \u201crope violence?\u201d<\/p>\n

The disconnect between the overwhelming public perception of rampant crime in the U.S. today and misleading statistics to the contrary are tied to the definition of crime.\u00a0 It\u2019s true that the homicide rate per 100,000 population has gone down over the past 30 years.\u00a0 But suicide is not the same as homicide and the public perception of rampant crime goes way beyond \u201chomicides.\u201d It covers pervasive crimes like car thefts, vandalism, rioting, burglaries, muggings, squatting, or flash mobs looting retail stores with impunity.<\/p>\n

Even worse are the cybercrimes bilking the elderly of their life savings.\u00a0 To say nothing of the hordes of illegal aliens criminally crossing our southern border \u2014 who then compound the felony by not showing up for their court dates with the forbearance of the president of the United States and his secretary of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n

When prosecutors in Democrat-controlled states refuse to charge trespassers, rioters, petty criminals, and radical insurrectionists who construct illegal encampments and occupy buildings on college campuses their crimes go unrecorded in the crime stats.\u00a0 The political activists who harassed and besieged the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices whose rulings they disagreed with violated federal law, but they were allowed to persist by politically-motivated Democrat officials in Washington.<\/p>\n

The Second Amendment protects an individual\u2019s right to bear arms for whatever reason he or she desires.\u00a0 While the number of guns in this country has more than doubled in the past 30 years, the decrease in the homicide rate over that period indicates that law-abiding Americans intend those guns for justifiable personal defense or deterrence, as well as for hunting or sport shooting. These days, you\u2019re taking on undue risk by not owning one.\u00a0 Those intent on crime will legally or illegally obtain guns regardless of gun control laws that unreasonably burden the rest of us.<\/p>\n

Although he wears a quasi-naval uniform and carries the three-star rank of Vice Admiral, the Surgeon General of the United States is not a sea-going admiral.\u00a0 As the \u201cNation\u2019s Doctor,\u201d he\u2019s an administrator not a practitioner (and he doesn\u2019t make house calls). \u00a0He\u2019s a bureaucrat who commands more than 6,000 public health officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and his purview is the physical and mental health of all Americans.<\/p>\n

His diagnosis of \u201cgun violence,\u201d which inflates the numbers by including suicide, and his prescription to ban legal so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d are outside his expertise and authority.\u00a0 In the immortal words of a real Admiral, David Farragut, \u201cDamn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rosen: Surgeon General misleads on gun violence In a July speech advocating for more stringent gun control, President Biden claimed that \u201cMore children are killed by a bullet than any other cause of death.\u201d That\u2019s surely an alarming and tragic statistic but a very misleading one.\u00a0 The use of the word \u201cchildren\u201d is deceptive, emotionally … 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":[39,14,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucraps","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103785","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=103785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103786,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103785\/revisions\/103786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}