Tuesday, April 9, 2013

GUNS Kill More than Clubs, Bats, Knives and other Weapons COMBINED

Nothing angers me more than when someone argues a point that doesn't exist. The accuracy of the following claim varies depending on how you frame it. Greg Abbott Texas Attorney General - "More people killed with hammers & clubs each year than rifles," This is true but can be misleading.

Even more so and false when its said like this:

Republican Congressman Paul Broun- "There are more people killed with baseball bats and hammers than are killed with guns." 

See FBI Statistics Below

FBI homicide data 2005-2011,

  

Salon.com explains why this argument is so absurd:
It’s a cute little meme, if wildly and obviously dishonest. First of all, set aside the fact that hammers and kitchen knives and cars are useful things outside of their capacity to maim, banning them would have tremendous negative impact on our economy and lifestyles. Guns, on the other hand, are designed specifically, primarily and exclusively for one purpose — to kill things. They have no other purpose, and heavily restricting their use would have no obvious impact on the economy or modern life (hunting will always be allowed).
Now, while rifles account for only a few hundred homicides every year, guns overall are responsible for many, many more murders — almost all of them. If you add up all the other methods used to kill people in 2011 (fire, drowning, poison, strangling, hammers, etc.), you get 4,081 non-gun homicides. That’s fewer than half of the 8,583 gun homicides. Guns killed more than 17 times more people than hammers and are responsible for nearly 70 percent of total murders. There’s a reason you don’t hear about mass hammering sprees.
Yes, assault rifles are used in a tiny fraction of guns crimes, about 2 to 8 percent, but petty crime was never the main target of the Assault Weapon Ban. Rather, it’s designed to stop mass shootings, where rifles are vastly overrepresented. Rifles or assault rifles were used to kill John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and were deployed in the the Beltway sniper attacks, the Columbine massacre, the Aurora movie theater attack, the Oregon shooting in December, the Sandy Hook spree and countless other massacres. [Salon.com 1/7/13]
We will certainly discuss more about guns and the 2nd Amendment since they are hot topics now.

No comments:

Post a Comment