-By Warner Todd Huston
After the shootings at an Oregon College, Obama ran as fast as he could to the TV cameras to exploit the deaths and flog his failed gun-banning policies. During his cynical presser he made the claim that states with stricter gun laws were safer for residents. He lied.
During his press conference to the nation immediately after the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, Obama made the claim that strict gun laws equates to fewer deaths.
“There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America,” Obama carped. “So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer? We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.” (My bold)
But do we “know” that? Many liberal websites immediately came out to support Obama’s claim saying that he’s right; more gun laws means fewer gun deaths.
But is this claim factual?
First, though, before we get to Obama’s specific claim, we need to note a singular fact that right off makes the lie to his general claim that more guns means more deaths.
A new study has discovered that since 1994 the number of guns in private hands in America have increased by a whopping 62 percent. Yet, the rate of homicide by gun has decreased by 49 percent since 1993.
If more guns means more deaths, this statistic could not be.
So, yes, Obama lied in the general sense that more guns means more deaths.
It should also be noted that deaths by gun as a result of suicide is several times more common than death by mass murder or even homicide. In 2013 21,175 people intentionally killed themselves with guns. In comparison, only about 110 people were killed by mass murderers, and an additional 8,124 were killed in homicides.
This is relevant because liberals rarely address suicides and often cynically lump suicide statistics in with murders in order to pump up the violent crime rates to fit with their desire to end the Second Amendment.
So, with those two facts out of the way, let’s address Obama’s more specific lie that more gun laws must mean fewer deaths.
Now, Eugene Volokh looked at Obama’s claim using the Brady anti-gun group’s ratings on states with what they feel are the “best” anti-gun laws. He found that in truth those states that get the best Brady anti-gun ratings have slightly higher rates of gun deaths!
The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero. (If you omit the fatal gun accident rates, then the correlation would be +.065, which would make the more gun-restricting states look slightly worse; but again, the correlation would be small enough to be essentially zero, given all the other possible sources of variation.) If we use the National Journal data (adding the columns for each state, counting 1 for each dark blue, which refers to broad restrictions, 0.5 for each light blue, which refers to medium restrictions, and 0 for each grey, which refers to no or light restrictions), the results are similar: +0.017 or +0.051 if one omits the fatal gun accident rates.
This “slightly higher” finding is almost statistically meaningless, though. So, as it happens, there is no obvious correlation between stricter gun laws and the number of deaths by gun. Stricter gun laws do not mean lower gun deaths.
Yes, Obama is a lair.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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