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Failing Anti-Gun Rag Finally Admits Biden Lies About Gun Deaths

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They also unveiled a logo that’s more representative of the WaPo role in our democracy.

All over the nation, left-leaning, anti-gun newspapers are failing.

The New York Times‘ circulation has dropped by 50 percent in just eight years. The LA Times is losing $40 million a year. It seems that the Washington Post has decided to try to save itself with a shocking, innovative, revolutionary tactic: telling the truth. Perhaps the paper’s owners have realized the same thing many of its readers did a long time ago: People read newspapers because they would like to read actual news, not what the current administration wishes were true. They printed a single article that finally admits what we’ve been telling them all along. (Watch out, they might admit that .223 ammunition isn’t any deadlier than any other centerfire ammunition! Ha ha ha, I’m a kidder.)

For all the details, we’re turning it over to the NSSF‘s inimitable Larry Keane!

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EVEN THE WASHINGTON POST CONCEDES BIDEN ADMIN. FAVORITE GUN CONTROL LIE IS, IN FACT, A LIE


By Larry Keane

It was a โ€œThe Pigs are Flyingโ€ moment after The Washington Post, the newspaper that has never found a gun control policy it did not fawn over, took up a gun control claim the Biden administration loves to repeat and determined it to be false.

To be clear, Glenn Kesslerโ€™s The Fact Checker couldnโ€™t bring itself to award any Pinocchios โ€“ not one โ€“ to the false claim, but its thorough breakdown and analysis of the claim left nothing misunderstood. Saying that โ€œGun violence is the leading cause of death for childrenโ€ is patently โ€œNot True.โ€

We wonโ€™t hold our collective breaths for The White House to issue a formal statement acknowledging their repeated lie. Instead, weโ€™re assuming President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, White House officials and gun control activists will simply continue repeating the false claim. And notwithstanding The Washington Postโ€™s fact checking, this lie will likely continue to be uncritically reported as โ€œfactโ€ by the mainstream media.

Still, having The Washington Post take up the claim and acknowledge it is false should be deserving of at least a little praise.

Favorite False Claim

President Biden has repeated the claim often as he pushes again and again for more gun control. He began his campaign for the presidency in 2019 by calling firearm manufacturers โ€œthe enemy.โ€ He now uses the โ€œfirearms are the leading cause of death for childrenโ€ to push ever more restrictions on the Second Amendment while saying little to nothing about holding violent criminals accountable, let alone calling out soft-on-crime prosecutors who let those same criminals back out on the streets to commit more crimes.

Vice President Harris recited the false claim in two recent events in North Carolina and in Washington, D.C. The White House used the false claim as a lede in aย recent press releaseย announcing new White House unilateral gun control executive actions.

Thereโ€™s no telling how often it has been repeated by U.S. Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, governors and any number of other local elected officials and gun control activists pushing the claim as a reason why more gun control is needed.

CBS Evening Newsย ran a segment repeating the claim. So didย ABC News.

Repeating the claim doesnโ€™t change the fact that it is false.

โ€œWhen you focus only on children โ€” 17 and younger โ€” motor vehicle deaths (broadly defined) still rank No. 1, as they have for six decades,โ€ The Washington Postย reported. โ€œIn the interest of accuracy, it would be better for White House officials to refer to children and teens when citing these reports. When all motor vehicle accidents are counted, then motor vehicle deaths continue to exceed firearm deaths for children โ€” defined as people under age 18 โ€” whether or not infants are included.โ€ Better? How about true.

Debunked Immediately

The claim in question came about as a result of aย faulty study published by the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention in April 2022. That study included Americans aged 18 and 19 years old โ€“ adults โ€“ in the data set as well as manipulated motor vehicle crash data to assert firearms became the โ€œleading cause of death among children and adolescentsโ€ in 2020. NSSF debunked the study when it was published in April 2022.

In his dissection of the misleading study, NSSFโ€™s Salam Fatohi summarized the ruse,ย writing,ย โ€œSince at least the 1990โ€™s, gun control advocates have used this trick of including adults in the data set to inflate the number of โ€˜childrenโ€™ to evoke an emotional reaction from readers of these studies to sway public opinion in favor of their agenda.โ€ Thatโ€™s exactly why the claim is still repeated so often today.

In The Washington Post analysis, The Fact Checker even included a White House spokesperson admitting this was their angle all along and that The Washington Post regularly uses the same tactic.

โ€œA White House official said it is standard practice for such research reports to include 18- and 19-year-olds in the data. He noted that The Washington Post, in writing about one of these reports, used โ€˜childrenโ€™ in the headline, even though the report covered gun deaths of children and adolescents.โ€

Spreading the Truth

Following The Washington Postโ€™s admission that the claim is false and the data had been manipulated, a handful of news sites took notice and highlighted the debunking.

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms posted about the Fact Check, noting โ€œWashington Post: Guns ARENโ€™T the Leading Cause of Death for Kids.โ€

โ€œAmong the left, the Post is still one of the gold-standard publications that can and should be listened to. The Washington Post declined to give any Pinocchios, which is what they use to rate claims, but they do a pretty good job of dismantling the study cited by anti-gun politicians like the vice president,โ€ Knightonย wrote.ย โ€œWhether someone wants to take our word about the issues with the study, though, is now irrelevant. Itโ€™s entirely likely they will listen to The Washington Post about guns and child deaths. They wonโ€™t, however, like what they see.โ€

At Hot Air, John Sextonย wrote about it as well. โ€œIt has become commonplace for the White House and left wing commentators to claim that gun violence is the number one cause of death for children,โ€ Sexton wrote. โ€œUltimately, Kessler doesnโ€™t give this misleading claim a ratingโ€ฆ It would also be nice if fact-checkers and reporters would point out how carefully massaged the data behind these claims are when the claims are made instead of waiting most of a year to explain it.โ€

Dan Zimmerman at Shooting News Weekly alsoย coveredย The Washington Postโ€™s admission. โ€œAfter much prefatory throat-clearing about the amount of โ€˜gun violenceโ€™ in this countryโ€ฆ, Kessler finally concludes with this gem when it comes time to award the Pinocchios: โ€˜In the interest of accuracy, it would be better for White House officials to refer to children and teens when citing these reportsโ€™โ€ฆ It must have physically hurt him to write even that much.โ€

The firearm industry takes pride in our efforts to use data and facts in our initiatives to reduce unintended firearm tragedies as much as possible and to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not possess them. Weโ€™ve been gratified to play a role in having that numberย reach historic lowsย in the past years and will continue to help reduce firearm tragedies even lower, especially among Americaโ€™s children.

The Biden administration and The White House ought to ditch the junk science lies and instead focus onย Real Solutionsยฎย to reduce criminal firearm violence. After all, President Bidenย complimented the firearm industryโ€™s efforts in the past, that is before deeming the industry โ€œthe enemy.โ€

 

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