Gropey Joe trotted out this old lie again:
Guns are the #1 killer of kids in America.
More than car accidents and more than cancer. We can't let that become just another statistic.
Let's ban AR-15-style firearms and other assault weapons.
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 16, 2023
Fortunately, the internet is full of fact checkers…
What is "Unintentional Injury" you ask?
Mostly drowning, car accidents, suffocation, fires etc. pic.twitter.com/teN3Qt83fM
— Unbiased Crime Report (@UnbiasedCrime) June 16, 2023
https://t.co/2mIF9utJ1b Using CDC data: In the most recent available census year of 2021, setting the age between 1-17 yrs old (legal minors) for all causes of death the total is: 35,654
Firearms are listed at: 2,590 or 7.26% of the total.
It was number 4 below medical causes.… pic.twitter.com/Y2zRXxbSrm— The Sicilian Irish Robot (@misteryrobozo) June 17, 2023
That lists firearms as the cause of 7.26% of child mortality in the US. But here “child” is “birth to 17.” A *lot* of those “children shot dead are in the upper age range… and were shot while committing crimes (“gang related,” no doubt). Shot by people defending themselves, shot by cops, shot by other criminals. These “victims” merit no sympathy, of course. Unfortunately, hard numbers are hard to come by, but there’s this:
Please accurately represent the numbers. It's tragic when anyone dies, but most of these "kids" dying from gun violence are older teens and it's gang-related. We need to go after the gangs. pic.twitter.com/f2L9IZcDwl
— Anonymous Because You People Are Crazy (@AnonBecauseOf) June 16, 2023
One response to “Child mortality: politics vs facts”
And, the teen gang killings are overwhelmingly done with handguns, not rifles, which are one of the least likely murder weapons in the United States. Yet they want to ban “assault weapons”, which are just a subset of rifles. The question here is if the gun controllers are just ignorant, or if they have ulterior motives.
Incidentally, that new “reader context” feature on Twitter is great, much better than official “fact checking”.