Moms Demand Action caught red-handed exploiting suicides while publicly stating suicides aren’t their problem
Moms Demand Action caught red-handed exploiting suicides while publicly stating suicides aren’t their problem
Moms
Demand Action are gun bullies. They lie and purposely engage in deceit
to try to push their gun control agenda. One of their standard playbook
lies is to
conflate
suicides with homicides and make it seem like crime is a bigger problem
than it is. Now they have been caught with blood on their hands,
stating they actually don’t care about suicides.
But their mindless minions don’t know – and mostly don’t care – about
the truth. In response to a tweet that links to a previous article that
correctly states that gun control doesn not reduce suicide, I received
this tweet, saying I should “be honest” – that guns are the easiest,
fastest way to commit suicide.
It
isn’t being dishonest to say that gun control policy has absolutely
nothing to do with suicides. It’s iron-clad fact. No one disputes that
20,000 people a year commit suicide with guns in the United States, or that this is roughly half of approximately 40,000 total suicides. What
is dishonest is when a
crime
like a mass shooting happens and gunbullies like Moms Demand Action
grandstand on the graves of the dead, citing the public health problem
of “gun violence” that they claim takes 30,000 lives per year, when 20,000 of these deaths are self-inflicted suicides and
not a crime. This is further compounded when you publicly state suicides are not your problem to tackle. It is
disingenuous at best & a purposeful, outright lie intended to
deceive at worst. To make this claim is to pretend that banning
so-called “assault rifles”, or restricting magazine capacity, or getting
stores like Starbucks or Staples to ban guns at their premises is
somehow connected to reducing these 20,000 suicides.
How many suicides,
happen with so-called “assault rifles” with 100-round magazines at a
Starbucks? Try zero.
While suicide may happen with a rifle or shotgun,
it makes most logical sense that handguns would be used most often
because of ease of maneuverability. Most firearm homicides are done hand
guns, not rifles (
6,371 handgun homicides and just 322 rifle homicides out of nearly 13,000 homicides in 2012). The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC)
Non-Vital Statistics Report from 2009 (Tables 10 and 18) reported 31,347 total firearm deaths in 2009, but of those, 18,735
were suicide by firearm deaths. There were 554 deaths from “accidental discharge of firearms.” The CDC statistics are very similar
for 2010, showing
“Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms” resulting in
19,392 deaths out of a total of 38,364 suicide deaths (table 10, p.23).
And yet, Moms Demand Action routinely cites 30,000 gun deaths,
and
routinely states that people are likely to use a gun to suicide vs
defend themselves. They are happy to exploit the deaths of the hurting
who have committed suicide to push their inane agenda (seriously, how is
getting Starbucks, Staples, or McDonalds to make their stores “gun free
zones” making anyone safer – especially when one considers that so many
high-profile mass shootings have occurred in gun-free zones, like
Aurora, Colorado, Sandy Hook Elementary, Virginia Tech, etc.?), but they
don’t promote policy that would help reduce suicides. In the following
screen shots, Moms Demand Action cites suicides five different times as a
big problem, 30,000 “gun deaths”, and so on.
Furthermore, Moms Demand Action was caught outright stating that
suicide was not their problem because they have too much on their hands
trying to get “gun reform”(the new term they use when they mean “gun
control”, which they avoid using because they know gun control has
negative connotations). In this screen shot, Moms Demand Action founder
Shannon Watts is telling a member suicides aren’t their “mission”. The
message is clear: Moms Demand Action will quote suicide figures to scare
members about the “gun violence” problem, but aren’t willing to do
anything about it.
And here, Moms Demand Action and Shannon Watts state guns are more
likely to be used on yourself in suicide than they are to protect you
from a criminal.
The tweet on the Moms Demand accout is a straight up lie; there are
vastly more defensive gun uses than there are suicides, period. The
tweet on the Shannon Watts account isn’t a straight up lie, but is
purposefully deceitful. It is based on the following graph that was
attached to the tweet. The graph compares justifiable homicides versus
suicides. The problem: most defensive gun uses don’t result in “killing”
the bad guy to “fend them off”. According
to the CDC, there are 500,000 to
3 million
defense gun uses per year. Contrast this with the 20,000 gun suicides
the CDC cites, and the 9,000 gun homicides the FBI states, and even the
120,000 instances of non-fatal violent crime committed with a gun
according to the Deartment of Justice, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and
it’s clear that people lawfully defend themselves with guns more than
all crime with guns, homicides and suicides – combined.
Academic
peer-reviewed research in
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide”
by Dr Don Kates and Gary Mauser shows that gun availability and
ownership rates have no correlation whatsoever with suicides. The study
looks at 36 developed nations – virtually all with much stronger gun
laws than the United States has –. and found many developed nations with
higher suicide rates than the U.S. The authors state, “The mantra more
equals more deaths and fewer guns equals fewer deaths is also used to
argue that ‘limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides’.
This assertion is directly contradicted by the studies of 36 nations,
which find no… relationship”. Dr’s Kates and Mauser go on to say “There
is simply no relationship evident between the extent of suicide and the
extent of gun ownership. In the absence of firearms, people who are
inclined to commit suicide kill themselves some other way.”
The fact
that guns don’t cause suicides is evident in the U.S. by two facts: one,
gun sales have been steadily climbing, and
setting records in 2012, and then
again in 2013; and two, the suicide rate in the U.S.
has been declining for decades.
Gun rights advocates are all for honesty in the so-called gun debate.
It would be refreshing to see some from the other side. We have yet to
see it. Dr’s Kates and Mauser also state that while guns don’t cause
crime,
what does drive crime are socio-cultural and economic factors. No one is addressing root causes of violence:
gangs
(which the FBI states is responsible for an “average of 48% of violent
crime in most jurisdictions” and up to 90% in some jurisdictions),
drug abuse (the single greatest predictor of violence – with or without mental illness – according to psychiatrists),
poverty, particularly
urban poverty,
and mental illness. If we want to really reduce violence and crime –
not just control people and push meaningless cosmetic policies – then we
need to address the causes.
Credit: WhiteHouse.govThe U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously today
against the Obama administration in a major case testing the reach
of federal power.
