The list of titles lends credibility to Dr. Miles’ responses. \u00a0And apparently Ms. Perry thinks that’s enough.<\/p>\n
As we’ll see, it’s not.<\/p>\n
Establish The Boogie\/Straw Men<\/strong> – Perry opens the door for the\u00a0de rigeur\u00a0<\/em>nod to Alinsky:<\/p>\n MinnPost: Do you believe that public-health officials are doing enough to reduce gun violence?\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Before Dr. Miles gets to his answer, I’d like to draw your attention to Berg’s Seventh Law<\/a>: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives\u2019 ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”<\/p>\n \u00a0Dr. Steve Miles: No, I don\u2019t, and partly it\u2019s because they\u2019re hamstrung. Since 1996, the NRA, which also functions as an anti-science institution, has cut U.S. funding for gun-related research from a public-health perspective by over 95 percent. So, in terms of impairing the types of data collection and data analysis that\u2019s necessary to do a public-health perspective, we\u2019ve currently wound up in a situation where the science itself is impaired.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Anti-science”.<\/p>\n “Racist”. \u00a0“Anti-Woman”. \u00a0“Bigot”.<\/p>\n They’re all slurs that the cultural left uses to try to cow conservatives into silence and compliance.<\/p>\n But the public health community impaired its own science decades ago by allowing itself to be co-opted into an arm of the gun control movement. \u00a0“Public health research” is paid for by anti-gun groups<\/a>\u00a0(a fact that’s never reported by a media that seems to have lost interest in afflicting the intellectually and politically comfortable). \u00a0Indeed, an amazing preponderance of “academic inquiry” into the Second Amendment is paid for by anti-gun organizations like the Joyce Foundation – legal<\/a>, political<\/a>, and academic<\/a>, across the board.<\/p>\n As to the actual “science” that Dr. Miles is flogging? \u00a0We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n Facial Absurdities<\/strong> – Next, Miles turns to the left’s canonical notion that without guns, everything would be juuuuust fine:<\/p>\n MP: What do you think will most surprise your audience on Wednesday about gun-violence statistics?<\/span><\/p>\n SM: Clearly, everybody understands that having a gun available increases the lethality \u2014 that is, the deadliness \u2014 of the suicidal impulse. If one has a suicidal impulse and there is a gun available as opposed to a knife, then the suicide attempt is much more likely to be lethal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’ll give Miles this much: \u00a0everyone knows that mental illness and guns don’t mix.<\/p>\n But availability of guns has little to do with suicide rates. \u00a0The suicide rate in the US is statistically identical to that in the UK, with its celebrated gun ban. \u00a0It’s a shade below Cuba, where only police and the military have guns. \u00a0It’s 15% lower than Hong Kong, where guns are not part of the culture; a little over half those of China and Japan, where civilian guns are strictly banned.<\/p>\n One – or Dr. Miles – could reply “but that’s a matter of cultural differences”. \u00a0And then one would be onto something, \u00a0something that applies across the gun control debate.<\/p>\n We’ll come back to that, too.<\/p>\n What\u2019s so interesting is that it\u2019s also true for homicide. The idea advanced by the NRA people is that homicides are basically done by monster criminals. But what really seems to be going on is that as the number of guns increases, as more houses have guns, as the gun saturation in the society rises, it\u2019s the availability of guns that turn ordinary interpersonal disputes, including domestic disputes, into lethal events.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And if sheer availability of firearms were the dispositive factor in determining whether disputes turned lethal, then the streets of DC and Chicago would be relatively placid, and rural Montana, Utah and North Dakota would be shooting galleries.<\/p>\n But the opposite is true.<\/p>\n And in fact one could note that murder in, say, Chicago<\/a>\u00a0– where guns are legally illegal – is far from evenly distributed; some neighborhoods are as safe as suburban Fargo, while others are vastly more dangerous than Baghdad.<\/p>\n And one could fairly note in response that parts of the rural South – where guns are generally very available – have fairly liberal gun laws and high rates of violence. \u00a0But cities in those same areas are often quite statistically placid.<\/p>\n So when Dr. Miles says…:<\/p>\n So homicide looks very much like suicide in being gun-prevalence-driven.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …one must add “except when you look at actual facts and stuff”.<\/p>\n And? \u00a0And? \u00a0AND?\u00a0<\/strong> – One of the left’s favorite tactics in the gun debate (as with so many debates) is to give an emotionally-chilling (and thus manipulative) factoid with no context whatsoever.<\/p>\n Right on cue:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n MP: One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents. As you note, the accidental gun death rate is 11 times higher among 5- to 14-year-olds in the U.S. than the combined rates of 22 other high-income developed countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hm. \u00a0That must be some number.<\/p>\n SM: It\u2019s a very sad number.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I’m sure when we see that number – the number of children killed in accidents – it’ll make our hearts ache.<\/p>\n When you have a gun in the house, for kids there is a 16-fold increase in the risk of a lethal accident involving a gun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, my.<\/p>\n So what’s the number?<\/p>\n So, despite what everybody says about gun education and gunlocks, it just doesn\u2019t work.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hm. \u00a0OK, so I’m sure the number will bear this out.<\/p>\n What’s the number, again?<\/p>\n A gun in the house is an accident just waiting to happen.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So you say, Dr. Miles. \u00a0So what’s the number?<\/p>\n MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Er, huh?<\/p>\n What’s the number?<\/p>\n According to the CDC<\/a>, in the entire US, in 2010 (the latest numbers the CDC provides), the number of kids below 15 killed by firearms was…<\/p>\n And yep, every one of those deaths is a tragedy. \u00a0 Education and gun locks are no\u00a0guarantee<\/em>, but they do help. \u00a0So does training gun owners in general.<\/p>\n But as a “public health” issue, accidental firearms deaths come in well below:<\/p>\n And about the same as the number killed in falls (74).<\/p>\n And so I have to ask (since no “journalist” ever will) – while, as a parent, I recoil at even one \u00a0child dying in an accident, I have to ask; what was Ms. Perry referring to when she said “One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents?” \u00a0Tragic, yes. \u00a0High?<\/p>\n Huh?<\/p>\n Schools Of Red Herrings Say “Huh?”<\/strong> – Miles next goes after the notion of armed self-defense with a hearty “I know you are but what am I?”<\/p>\n MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA often says that guns prevent their owners from becoming crime victims. In fact, they claim that huge numbers of gun owners find themselves in situations each year in which they are forced to use their weapons to defend themselves and their families.<\/p>\n SM: I spent some time tracking that down. [And by “some”, Miles apparently means “not a whole lot”. \u00a0But I’m getting way ahead of myself – Ed.<\/em>] Mostly, they cite an article from 1995 by Kleck and Gertz, which cites 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. But the Cato Institute \u2014 which is an anti-gun-control conservative group \u2014 took a different approach. What they did is [search] eight years of news clippings. They found only a few hundred events over those eight years \u2014 somewhere around 450 or so. That\u2019s a long way from 2.5 million.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This paragraph presents its “data” so very, very misleadingly that if I were a teacher grading Dr. Miles’ paper, I’d swat him on the knuckles with a ruler and have a word with him about intellectual honesty. \u00a0To try to introduce him to the subject.<\/p>\n Let me count the misstatements, frauds and lies in the above statement:<\/p>\n So Miles’ approach – compare an informal survey of news coverage to a detailed, peer-reviewed study of the subject – is academically ludicrous as well as intellectually void.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/2010-Kids-Accidental-Gun-Deaths.png\" "\\"2010")
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