More Medical Propaganda disguised
as a "study" about Firearms and Risk
By Dean Weingarten. August 26, 2020
Article Source
The American Journal of Medicine recently published a paper about deaths associated with firearms. The paper misleads in the first sentence of the abstract. The lie is in the unstated, false assumption. It is a subtle but important shift in causation.
The first sentence in the abstract is:
News media and policy makers frequently discuss deaths from firearms, drug overdoses, and motor vehicle accidents. The shift in causation is done when the author inserts the word from before firearms and associates firearms with drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents. The correct word would be with.
The correct usage would differ for each statistic. A corrected sentence would read thus:
News media and policy makers frequently discuss deaths committed with firearms, from drug overdoses, and from motor vehicle accidents.
Firearms are objects. Drug overdoses and motor vehicle accidents are actions. The author repeats the error by listing firearms as a "cause of death".
..... 
"An absolutist might claim if there were no guns, there would be no gun accidents. No rational person believes the number of firearms in society can be reduced to zero. Even with the draconian gun controls put in place in Australia in 1997, the number of private guns is now more than it was before the controls were put in place."
