On April 11, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke at the Gun Violence Prevention Discussion (GVPD) where she reiterated the false claim that approximately “90 people a day die from gun violence.”
The GVPD was held in Port Washington, New York, and Clinton was introduced to the audience by Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY-3rd). In the last year alone, Israel has pushed a handgun ammo ban, defended unsuccessful backdoor gun control pushes by the DOJ, and promised to “force and even shame” Republicans into placing more gun control on all gun owners because of the actions of two terrorists in San Bernardino.
According to FOX 10 Phoenix, Clinton took the mic at GVPD by stating her admiration for Rep. Israel then quickly turned her attention to gun control. Once on the topic, she wasted no time in restating a false claim her campaign has been pushing throughout the current presidential primary season: namely, that approximately “90 people a day die from gun violence.” She added, “That is 33,000 people a year.”
Breitbart News previously reported that Clinton is swelling the actual number of deaths due to “gun violence” by approximately 66 percent. She is literally reporting the figure as being two-thirds higher than it actually is. And she does this by lumping in suicides and accidental deaths with murders and other violent attacks that are carried out with firearms.
In reality, the U.S. averages around 30,000 firearm-related deaths a year. Of these, a very small number are accidental and about a third of the 30,000 are actually related to “gun violence.” For example, the overall number of firearm-related deaths in 2013 was approximately 32,888. Of these, the number of accidental deaths was 505 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the number of deaths due to actual “gun violence” was 11,208. But when Clinton repeats these numbers, she adds accidental deaths and homicides — which equals 11,713 — then adds the 21,175 firearm-related suicides, rounds the number off at “33,000,” and names “gun violence” as the cause for all these things.
Clinton tried to motivate the GVPD audience to stand up to “the gun lobby” by saying, “If anything else were killing 33,000 people a year, we would be mobilized.” She claimed that cars used to be far deadlier than they are now, but suggested the passage of car safety regulations has changed that. She equated gun control with seat-belt requirements and lambasted “the gun lobby” for opposing “gun safety” measures.
The ironic thing is that car-related deaths are higher than 33,000, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). In fact, in 2013, there were 35,369 car-related deaths. Not only is that 2,369 deaths higher than the figure Clinton quoted for guns, but as a percentage, it shows cars to be far more dangerous than guns.
Their danger is easy to understand when you consider that there were approximately one hundred million fewer cars than guns in 2013, yet car-related deaths outpaced gun-related deaths. So even if the number of car deaths and gun deaths were identical, as a percentage, cars would still be far more dangerous because of the carnage that results from a much lower number of them versus guns.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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