Gun-Grabbers Keep Pushing
Deception Masked as Settled Truth
By David Codrea, February 6th 2015
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Once more presenting an anti-gun talking point-sharing piece as “news,” the “professionals” Dianne Feinstein calls “real reporters” and Joe Biden calls “legitimate news media” (whom I refer to as “Authorized Journalists” and “Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists”) 
are ramping up the meme that high “gun control” states are the safest places to live. A recent hit piece by SFGate gets into the big deception right out of the starting gate with the headline “States with high gun ownership have more firearm deaths.”
Such advocacy journalism based on agenda “science” is not surprising, and I say this from personal experience. Case in point was a Slate piece in which a Harvard “ethicist,” in true “progressive”/Opposite Day fashion, posted an interview with an anti-gun “researcher” that flat-out lied about me putting out a “Wanted” poster on him, and tied that in with claimed, but unsubstantiated, threats on his life. And being part of the “medical” establishment, the lie was compounded to put agenda over truth in the prominent journal, “Nature.”
It’s this nexus between supposed “scientific” literature and the agenda-promoting “free press” from which such memes are born and seeded, so that ignorant former liberal arts majors who now consider themselves to be crusading journalists, can be manipulated into spreading ideological manure.
As long as we’re proving things for ourselves and not taking my word for anything, a practice I always recommend regardless of who is ladling out unfamiliar stuff they want you to swallow, let’s take a look at the charge I made in the first paragraph, that the 
SGGate headline is not true, and more than that, intentionally deceptive. In order to do that, you need to next check the “study” the article cites as the basis for its assertions, and ... what...? It’s a propaganda release from the Violence Policy Center...? The group with the director who said he’s counting on the press being confused into thinking semiautomatic firearms are machine guns...? Which, of course, has proven to be the case...?
Still, let’s not fall into the “progressive” habit of relying on ad hominem dismissals. What’s wrong with what VPC is claiming, evidently backed up with government numbers?
For starters, “ownership” is a legal and moral term. There can be a big difference between a gun “possessor” and a gun “owner,” and a huge difference in terms of how the two groups behave.
Now do a search on the terms “states high gun ownership rates more firearm deaths” and see another bit of bait and switch for yourself. While the “reports” will start out talking “gun deaths” to sway the headline surfers and the reading-challenged, it turns out what’s really being highlighted are “rates.” And those hardly reflect real numbers to show where more people are being murdered by criminals with guns they obtained illegally.
As noted in a previous JPFO Alert, the relevant thing to look at is who is doing the killings, and where they are being done. A high-crime area like Chicago, which registered 82 people shot and 14 killed over a Fourth of July weekend, is hardly reflective of the rest of Illinois, 
and hardly the responsibility of the significant portion of the population that endured state infringements and obtained Firearm Owners Identification cards. Lumping peaceable gun owners in with a concentration of chronic predators may help paint the distorted picture the antis wish to present, but giving homicidal sociopaths even more of an advantage is something that only makes sense to “progressives.”
Still, in fairness, SFGate did not rely entirely on Josh Sugarmann & Co. desperately looking for a grant-attracting star argument to hitch their wagon to. They also consulted the Sydney School of Public Health, which, in spite of a committed global citizen disarmament agenda, does compile a very useful collection of gun laws by country, which I refer to with regularity in proving how restrictive gun laws are exploited to ensure tyrannies remain unchallenged and innocents can be slaughtered with impunity.
And in fairness to that source, rather than dismiss them because of their motives, we still need to see if there is truth to their claims. In this case, the SFGate piece assures readers “America's gun death rates -- both nationwide and in the states -- dwarf those of other industrialized nations.”
Funny thing about that meaningless “industrialized” (or sometimes “developed”) nations label the antis have been bandying about with regularity for years, and in this case, I mean “peculiar funny,” not “ha ha funny.” 
Among the countries excluded from such tallies like the one put out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, essentially a coalition of control-grasping global collectivists comprised of 34 member nations, with oblivious U.S. tax cows footing 22 percent of their tab, are Mexico, which has a larger GDP than many of the nations that qualified as “developed,” and Russia, both of which have much more restrictive “gun laws” and higher homicide rates. The “funny” part is prompted by Obama’s FCC looking at using the Russian satellite system to “improve” the U.S. 911 emergency telephone call system, meaning the same people who tell us not to own guns, but to instead dial 911 and die, are then content to trust your life to what they evidently rate as a Third World, undeveloped backwater.
But wait, as the late TV pitchman Billy Mays used to say, there’s more! 
Remember how I noted there’s a difference between gun owners and gun possessors? The SFGate piece acknowledges one more source at the very end, “Prevalence of Household Firearms and Firearm-Storage Practices in the 50 States and the District of Columbia: Findings from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2002,” from the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Did you catch that? “Prevalence,” not “ownership.” Do you see what they’re doing and why? None of the questions asked if telephone survey respondents actually owned their guns. Further, “Respondents were excluded if they had unknown responses or refused to answer the questions.”
How would you answer some unknown telephone solicitor asking if you owned guns? How do you think people who have no inhibitions about committing violent crimes with guns would answer?
It’s again “funny,” just not very humorous, how the same crowd that disparages the findings of researchers like Gary Kleck as “The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership” then turn around and employ such similar methodologies to make their own case. It leaves us with only one thing to say, an appropriate reaction summed up in three words by my regular go-to guy commentator on standard gun prohibitionist tactics.
David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. David Codrea's Archive page.
