Tuesday, February 15, 2011

PolitiFact and Doonesbury's gun death numbers

PolitiFact | Doonesbury strip says 270,000 Americans have been killed by guns since 9/11:




'What are we like as a people?' Slackmeyer muses to himself in his studio. 'Nine years, ago we were attacked -- 3,000 people died. In response, we started two long, bloody wars and built a vast homeland-security apparatus -- all at a cost of trillions! Now consider this. During those same nine years, 270,000 Americans were killed by gunfire at home. Our response? We weakened our gun laws.'
Don't like the 270K number? Politifact calls it 'Mostly True' and finds you can make case for estimating a significantly higher figure. Still ... fine, take out the suicides, assuming they'd have found another way. You're still around 170K. Or, look at just the accidents. More accidental gunshot deaths since 9/11 than died on 9/11. Still don't want to do anything about gun control laws? Those deaths you can just shrug off as the price of being 'safe', or the price of being 'free'? Then, I trust you are furious about the civil liberties abuses since 9/11. Otherwise, you should consider the possibility you are one massively hypocritical [expletive deleted].

Related:

I make the modest proposal that a country only needs 200 million guns if it has one trillion bears.Thu Jan 13 12:58:14 via web
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...