During a January 4 press briefing, White House press secretary Josh Earnest cited debunked Everytown for Gun Safety statistics as one of the reasons behind President Obama’s decision to move forward with executive gun control.
Earnest said:
There’s an organization that Mr. Bloomberg, former mayor of New York runs, Everytown for Gun Safety, that according to their analysis, there are seven children or teenagers killed by a gun in the average day, that’s an alarming statistic.
It’s a tragedy … there’s no law that we’re going to pass that prevents every single one of them but not passing laws and a failure on the part of congress to act hasn’t helped the situation.
It must be noted that Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety is notoriously sloppy in the way they conduct studies and gather statistics.
For example, in December 2014 Everytown released a study claiming “100 school shootings” had occurred in America since the heinous December 2012 Sandy Hook attack. But when Breitbart News examined the study–calling police departments and universities to follow up on some of the reports–it was discovered that some of the so-called “school shootings” did not even happen at school, others were actually just examples of legally-possessed guns being accidentally discharged, and still others did not happen at all.
This same sloppiness is evident in the way Everytown adds children and teenagers together to calculate their number of daily gun deaths. Lumping teenagers with children allows them to mix deaths from gang violence and street crime into the category of child deaths, thus raising the number.
Breitbart News previously reported that if we look at real child deaths–children under the age of 10–the “number of children unintentionally killed in fire-related deaths was over seven times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths, and the number of children killed in unintentional drowning deaths was sixteen times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths.”
In other words, if we are really trying to take care of children, more gun laws would be no where near the top of our list. But regulations on swimming pools, bath tubs, five gallon buckets, matches, and flammable fluids certainly might.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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