Jim Fleming – a lawyer and good acquaintance – wrote on Facebook (and I’m quoting with permission):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Well, the CDC says . . . .”<\/p>
Every time someone starts a discussion with me, using this language, I steel myself against the loss of good humor. I do not trust the CDC. Period. Why? Because it is primarily a political organization, which sings the song of those who feed it the most bread. Proof?<\/p>
Well, try this. In 1995 Criminology Professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, published the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey that argued that Americans use firearms to defend themselves (from display gun – no shooting to pull gun and actual shooting with fatal effect) on the order of over 1 million times each year. (Actually they said more likely two to three million times per year).<\/p>
Of course the anti-gun lobby went absolutely batshit crazy and numerous attempts were made to discredit Kleck and Gertz. Results? Lions – about 11, “Christians” – 0. Kleck and Gertz repeated their studies several times with the same results. Numerous studies attempting to discredit them, were unsuccessful. The part the CDC played in all of this?<\/p>
“In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU) in four to six states. Analysis of the raw data allows the estimation of the prevalence of DGU for those areas. Estimates based on CDC\u2019s surveys confirm estimates for the same sets of states based on data from the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey (Kleck and Gertz 1995). Extrapolated to the U.S. as a whole CDC\u2019s survey data imply that defensive uses of guns by crime victims are far more common than offensive uses by criminals. CDC has never reported these results.” Forbes magazine, April 2018, author Paul Hsieh..<\/p>
Now, in 2013, Father Obama (the smartest man in the world – just ask him) yet again ordered the CDC to conduct a study and this time “get the numbers right!” So, eating the bread and clearing its throat to sing, the CDC ordered The National Academies\u2019 Institute of Medicine and National Research Council to conduct the survey. They did, and they came back and reported that, \u201cDefensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence\u201d: Matching the results found by Kleck and Gertz, lo those many years before. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”<\/p>
Obama was outraged, primarily because he was going around telling everybody that it was not true. So,he ordered the results buried. (In the old days, they simply killed the report writers to silence their tongues, but modernly that is frowned upon) And the results were buried, from that day forward, until recently.<\/p>
Moral: Just because officialdom spews a line of bullshit at you, does not, in any way, mean you have to lap it up like mother’s milk. Being an American, patriotically vigilant about liberty and justice for all, is hard goddamned work. It requires objective, critical thinking, every day. The herd cannot and will not do this. Those who do not run with the herd get really good at it.<\/p>
Don’t be part of the herd. . .z . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
We’ve got an awful lot of people in this country – including way too much of the media – who think “guy in a white coat” = “science” – and, by extension, “political appointee boss of guy in white coat” – “science”, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the terrible job out schools do at teaching critical thinking is going to be an even bigger problem in 20 years than it is today, as all those Sander\/AOC\/Omar supporters become the generation that actually controls things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Heaven help us all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jim Fleming – a lawyer and good acquaintance – wrote on Facebook (and I’m quoting with permission): “Well, the CDC says . . . .” Every time someone starts a discussion with me, using this language, I steel myself against the loss of good humor. I do not trust the CDC. Period. Why? Because it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73805"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73806,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73805\/revisions\/73806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}