Bob Costas, famed sports announcer.
Gun dot com reported that the NRA is willing to accept Bob Costa's wager. NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox translates the terms of the bet from athletes to civilians at large and to make his point uses the extremely faulty CDC report that came out after Newtown. In it, DGU estimates start with 500,000 per year. This is incredibly deceptive - even our daily commenter Greg Camp is more honest and accurate than that.
But, DGU estimates are, after all, estimates. Where they really go off the rails is in saying that in 2008 there were 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms. This is something that can be fact-checked using FBI hard numbers.
Is it possible that Chris Cox and his people didn't do that fact checking? Or was it purposely deceptive to talk about DGU estimates of half-a-million a year and up, as well as low-balling the 2008 numbers of violent crimes committed with firearms by 25% (or whatever the difference really is - TS can tell us).
Putting the ratings matter aside, and speaking to the statistical point Cox is making, the CDC put out a study in 2013, commissioned by the president in response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that found that firearms are much more likely to be used in a defensive manner rather than for criminal or violent activity.
“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed. 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 per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” stated the study.
FBI
- Information collected regarding type of weapon showed that firearms were used in 67.7 percent of the nation’s murders, 41.3 percent of robberies, and 21.2 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for forcible rape.) (See Expanded Homicide Data Table 7, Robbery Table 3, and the Aggravated Assault Table.)
Figuring that some of the 90,000 rapes in 2008 were done at gun point, we have about 400,000 violent crimes committed with guns, not 300,000.
Another problem with the NRA argument is what we always run into when re-hashing the DGU thing. Those estimates of DGUs, even the lower ones which were conveniently omitted in this article, include things like brandishings and shooting at animals. In order to make a fair comparison, you can't compare that number to ONLY violent crimes committed with guns, you'd have to compare the DGUs to gun crimes NOT limited to murder, robbery, assault and rape. We'd have to include the lesser offenses too, illegal brandishings, domestic abuse involving guns that doesn't rise to the level of aggravated assault, lost and dropped guns. In order to be really fair, we'd have to ESTIMATE how many illegal and improper uses of guns take place every year.
In other words, when counting DGUs, the gun nuts are all inclusive. But when counting gun crimes for comparison purposes, they have very specific criteria.
This brings us to a familiar question. If the gun-rights movement truly had right on its side, why would it continually resort to such underhanded trickery when making its point?
