by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
Whenever the anti-gunners cook up a stew of numbers to support further restrictions on the lawful ownership of firearms, the media is always ready to serve that dish to an unsuspecting public.
Sometimes percentages are used when the real numbers don’t count.
Sometimes the generic term “guns” is used when the numbers won’t support an initiative against handguns.
These anti-gun stews have little basis in reality when it comes to public policy issues. They are intentionally concocted to support a pre-conceived agenda. And they are published in journals that cover the credentials of the so-called think tanks and policy analysts who confected them.
One of the latest of these was gobbled up by the news media and regurgitated under the headline, “Study Finds Gun Accidents, Suicides on Increase among Children.”
Contradictory Facts
The headline seems to run contra to government and National Safety Council reports about homicides, suicides and accidents involving firearms which have been published in recent years. The numbers have been going down steadily, with the smallest reduction in suicides. In fact, the latest government figures indicate that there are substantially more suicides than homicides involving firearms. And the National Safety Council shows that the number of fatal firearms accidents—for children as well as the overall population—has dropped to the lowest level since such records were first published beginning near the start of the 1900s.
“Though overall firearm deaths are down nationwide, an analysis of gun accidents and suicides among kids finds that within certain age groups there were startling increases,” the report on the study began.
“The greatest increases were among 5- to 9-year-olds, where the number of accidental firearm deaths increased 21% and among 10-14-year-olds, where there was a 21% increase in the number of firearm suicides.
“These findings were reported by Victoria Reggie Kennedy, president of the non-political gun safety and gun violence prevention organization Common Sense about Kids and Guns, on the one-year anniversary of the group’s founding,” the story continued. (Mrs. Kennedy is the wife of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).)
The “Common Sense” group is one of many such advocacy groups funded by grants from anti-gun foundations that hope to direct public policy by claiming to be “non-political” while masking their real agenda. Another such group was formed in Boulder, CO, in October.
“Common Sense highlighted national mortality statistics from the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics that showed how overall firearm deaths for children and teens (0-19) were down 10% in 1998, but non-homicide firearm deaths (i.e. accidents and suicides) only declined 4% from 1997 to 1998 (from 1,643 to 1,577),” the report continued.
“Common Sense, which focuses on parental responsibility for preventing kids’ unsupervised access to guns, pointed out that in non-homicide categories, especially among younger kids, there were actually increases.
Real Numbers
But when you look past the percentages at the real numbers, a different picture emerges.
The media reports said: “The study found that:
When you go back and look at the real numbers, you see that for kids under 15, non-homicide firearms deaths in the period increased by a total of 8 nationwide.
And among children between 5 and 9 years old, there was an actual increase of 6 in the total of accidental firearms deaths.
Long ago in journalism school, we were instructed to never say “only” in connection with any number of deaths. But in this case, “only” is relevant because it provides a more realistic evaluation of what “Common Sense” really has to say. Using such numbers to produce scary percentages is statistical tom-foolery. When the numbers themselves don’t add up, and there is no significant trend, resort to percentages.
This is essentially the kind of reality that John Lott, senior researcher at Yale University, used to debunk the firearms accident claims of Gov. Parris Glendening in Maryland. The governor was promoting his trigger lock and “smart gun” legislation with inflated claims.
When Lott checked the numbers, he found that there had been two such incidents in the period the governor cited.
The report on the “Common Sense” study eventually made it clear that the organization was promoting “safe firearms storage”—that is gun locks and “smart guns.” But if they hadn’t played with the numbers, they wouldn’t have been able to promote their agenda at all. They needed a hook for their PR and percentages gave them one. How many headlines would they have gotten if they had started by saying that 8 or 6 more children in those age groups had been killed accidentally during their study period?
The job of the anti-gun think tanks is to come up with headlines that will change public opinion. If they have to fudge the numbers, they will do so.
While the first story was making headlines, another by Reuters “Health” news service, claimed that guns remain in homes of depressed teens. This so-called study is linked to the relatively new policy of some health professionals to intervene in the family affairs of patients with guns.
“Even after being told by a health professional that keeping a gun at home may increase the likelihood that a depressed child will attempt suicide, most parents of depressed teens do not remove firearms from their homes, according to a new study, Reuters said.
“The high proportion of families who, after receiving information, continued to keep a gun in the house is concerning, given the apparent risk for suicide conveyed by a gun in the home and the 30-fold increased risk for suicide conveyed by adolescent depression,” Dr. David A. Brent and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania wrote in the October issue of The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“Based on research indicating that depressed teens who live in homes where a gun is present are more likely to attempt suicide than those living in firearm-free homes, Brent and his colleagues began asking parents of teens treated for depression in an outpatient clinic whether they had a gun at home. If the family did have a gun at home, parents were counseled on the suicide risks of keeping a gun at home and advised to remove the gun from the house. If there was not a gun in the home, however, the parents and patients were not counseled on the dangers of keeping a gun at home.
Gun-Free Zones
“Most parents did not heed the advice about making their homes gun-free zones, the researchers report. During a child’s treatment and up to 2 years later, guns were removed from only one-fourth to one-third of the houses that had firearms.
“And some homes that were previously gun-free had firearms present at the end of the study. In fact, about one out of every six such households obtained a gun by the end of the 2-year follow-up period,” the report claimed.
At this point, you might have guessed what the recommendation for future action would be, but here is what Reuters reported was the conclusion:
“The results of the study show that doctors and other health professionals need to do more to make parents of depressed teens aware of the risks of having a gun at home, including discussing the issue with families who do not have firearms to ensure that their homes remain gun-free, according to the researchers.”
There you have it. These researchers don’t want to merely remove guns, they also want to be sure the families that don’t already have firearms don’t become gunowners.