Editor's Note: This article is from Gun Pulse, an email-only newsletter from The Sentinel published six days per week to cover the battle over the Second Amendment. If you want to read more content like this, sign up for free here.
Firearms Policy Coalition drew attention to manipulated data in a recent advisory published by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that called firearm violence a “public health crisis.”
The advisory, which is a “public statement that calls the American people’s attention to an urgent public health issue,” noted the number of deaths with firearms in the United States and claimed that “firearms are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents.” Firearms Policy Coalition asserted in an analysis that the data were considerably misleading.
Murthy and his staff counted young people aged eighteen and nineteen as part of the statistic, thereby inflating the perceived severity of firearm deaths among children. “These same adults, who can get married, drive a car, buy a house, assume debt, vote, and who the state gleefully drafts for war, are somehow considered children,” the analysis observed.
Firearms Policy Coalition also observed that children under one year old are meanwhile not counted since a substantial share of childhood deaths happens to be infant mortalities. “The disarmament regime is not counting infant mortalities because they know that such deaths would destroy their narrative about gun violence,” the analysis commented.
The advocacy group concluded by noting that “no statistic, no research, and no amount of data manipulation,” even if they did happen to be accurately represented, can ever “justify depriving peaceable people of the moral and natural right to self-defense.”
They called the advisory a “ravaging of research” that exemplifies the “wholesale collaboration between academia and jackboots to prop up, justify, and legitimize leveraging state violence against peaceable people” to make them “defenseless, desperate, and dependent.”
Murthy and other federal public health officials called on lawmakers to require “safe storage of firearms,” implement “universal background checks,” expand “purchaser licensing laws,” and prohibit “assault weapons and large-capacity magazines for civilian use.” They likewise lauded the value of extreme risk protection orders, which allow courts to confiscate firearms without due process for individuals deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
The advisory from Murthy acknowledged the disparate number of firearm deaths which occur among African-Americans, but the document nevertheless dismissed the phenomenon as a result of “structural, institutional, and individual racism” in the United States.
