This is much more telling than people realize. Mayors Against Illegal
Guns (MAIG), or more accurately Criminals Against Guns (since a high
percentage of the mayors involved are criminals) did a little reading
of what they purported to be victims of gun violence. What they
actuall did was just read a list of people killed by firearms,
regardless of the situation.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/19/bloomberg-group-sorry-for-reading-boston-bombers-name/
Why is this so telling, do you ask? Or even a surprise? Well, it
isn't a surprise really. However, what it exposes is how groups such
as MAIG balloon numbers. This is the thing about fooling the public
that is generally uneducated in such matters. I can give you all the
numbers for people killed in a firearm homicide. What I can also do
is not exclude numbers of those where the homicide was ruled
justified, since it is still in the same broad category of the
definition. Or, I can say "all these people were killed by guns"
neglecting to say:
oh yeah, this was probably a terriorist killed by the guns of law enforcement.
Proof their numbers are fake or they just don't care enough to vet them.
Don't forget suicides....they lump them in there when they need to puff up their evil statistics.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Rabid. In addition to other numbers that have no place in their stats.
DeleteThey don't care about justifying... They just want NUMBERS!!!
ReplyDeleteThat's it exactly, NFO. Unfortunately, most of the public doesn't ask questions just accepts them.
DeleteThere are Lies, Damn Lies, and Gun Control Statistics.
ReplyDeleteYep, and facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
DeleteThey were including killed in combat as well for a while.
ReplyDeleteThere was a book I read in high school about lying with statistics such as "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are (Al Gore was big on that in his global warming movie) or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.
Good points, too, Brigid. You would think suck actions would discredit organizations that do this, but no one seems to care. I know if I was a journalist I wouldn't cite them as a source. Then again, where else do you go for the "opposing point of view?". There just aren't a whole lot of actual organizations out there.
DeleteI don't agree about this
ReplyDelete