CNN’s Cuomo Questions If Guns Keep Americans Safe — ‘You Give No Dignity to the Dead By Abusing the Facts’

Tuesday on CNN’s “New Day,” host Chris Cuomo opined about how guns are used in the United States and argued there was a case to be made that guns are not the self-defense mechanism their advocates make them out to be.

Cuomo also dismissed the notion that mental illness was a factor in the amount of gun violence in the United States compared to other countries.

Transcript as follows:

You give no dignity to the dead by abusing the facts. So, let’s start with them. In the wake of the mass shootings, gun control, or lack there of, gets hot. Facts become a casualty of poison politics. Gun rights advocates will say guns save more lives than take. They cite statistics, guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. And of those instances, the vast majority of times, the gun owner only need brandish his weapon or fire a warning shot to turn back his attacker.

But here’s what they don’t say — first, federal research on gun research is spotty. That’s a political problem. We don’t want to take a look at this closely enough. Why? It’s a bigger discussion. Second, their suggestion is misleading because its based on information from the 80s and 90s. The crime rate was much higher then. So, they extrapolate that data out to today when we have a very different situation. Third, their own number creates a frightening reality. For a gun to be used in self-defense 2.5 million times a year, that’s once every 13 seconds, alright? So the FBI actually counts the average of justified homicides that use a gun. And they have about 213 a year from 2005 to 2010. So there’s clearly a leap being made here. Those numbers don’t size up.

So, here is the reality — for all the talk about mental illness as the key, studies show the U.S. doesn’t have more mental illness than anywhere else, but we do have 25 times the rate of gun murder — 25 times. Americans own more guns per capita than any other country. In fact, half of all civilian-owned guns in the world are owned by Americans. America has more mass shootings than any other country in the world. We own more guns. We have more mass shootings. What are we going to do about it?

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