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billh58

(6,641 posts)
Sat May 17, 2014, 11:44 AM May 2014

Right Wing Gun Nuts Manipulate Data, Falsely Claim Hammers and Clubs More Deadly

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-gun-nuts-manipulate-data-falsely-claim-hammers-and-clubs-more-deadly

Right-wing NRA "talking point"

- Snip -

Awr Hawkins looks at murder rates across the country and declares he's found the new weapon gun control advocates should try to ban: hammers. "For in looking at the FBI numbers from 2005 to 2011, the number of murders by hammers and clubs consistently exceeds the number of murders committed with a rifle."

How strange, you might think. Can this be true? Well, as "The Slog" notes in a neat little piece of debunking, that's because our friendly right-wing conspiracy lover is talking about rifles, and only rifles. Not handguns, shotguns or other kinds of weapons. "But of course, being a Breitbart writer, Hawkins blithely ignores the other 8,260 firearm-related homicides in 2011 attributed to shotguns, handguns, and other unidentified guns."

That makes our friend at Breitbart.com one of the most tortured twisters of statistics I've ever encountered. A quick look at the data reveals that out of 12,664 total victims on the chart, 8,583 were killed by firearms. That's basically two-thirds, more than any other kind of weapon.

- Snip -

It also seems fairly obvious that if you must rely on false equivalencies and incomplete data to argue that guns are essentially safe, you have no business entering a high school debate on gun control, let alone conversing with adults on the topic.


Yet we see the same old tired and thoroughly debunked right-wing NRA talking points trotted out time and time again from people who claim that a gun is just an "inanimate object," yet have the audacity to equate being pro-gun with being pro-choice. There is absolutely nothing Liberal about carrying a lethal weapon in public, and the so-called "pro-gun" lobby is overwhelmingly made up of right-wing extremists (see the Bundy "militia&quot .
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Right Wing Gun Nuts Manipulate Data, Falsely Claim Hammers and Clubs More Deadly (Original Post) billh58 May 2014 OP
Hammers are more dangerous than flintlocks! villager May 2014 #1
Great news! Think of how much we could save on the military. enki23 May 2014 #2
Yeah shenmue May 2014 #3
 

villager

(26,001 posts)
1. Hammers are more dangerous than flintlocks!
Sat May 17, 2014, 12:15 PM
May 2014

Case closed -- no gun anywhere, of any type, should ever be regulated ever!

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