Last year, just in time for tax day, actress Julianne Moore made a small splash after Everytown for Gun Safety [sic] hired her to read their scripts. This year she’s back for more, lighting the Empire State Building for Gun Violence Awareness Day, sharing pictures of “gun violence” victims on Instagram, and releasing a PSA with more lies and distortions facts and figures from the GunViolenceArchive and the Brady Campaign.
A couple of things about the young victims of “gun violence” of whom she took advantage to promote EveryTown’s agenda. In the People magazine piece about the pictures, she said
“On an average day, seven kids or teens are killed by guns,” Moore said. “With regulation, you reduce deaths.”
“We’re not talking about something outrageous,” she said. “We’re talking about closing the background loophole, when guns are allowed to be sold without background checks, so there are fewer illegal guns in the world.”
One problem with Ms. Moore’s so-called solution; in at least two of the three cases she cites, closing the (non-existent) “background loophole” would have made precisely zero difference. Her first victim, Tyrone Lawson, was killed in Chicago, which currently requires background checks on all firearm transfers.
Her second “victim,” Jeffrey Banish, was 21 years old and committed suicide with a gun. The only thing gun control advocates like the Brady Campaign, Everytown and Ms. Moore do is divert resources which might otherwise help people like Jeffrey get the help they need since, as we have pointed out so often here on TTAG, limiting “access” to firearms does nothing to reduce overall suicide rates.
Regarding her PSA, Ms. Moore says:
It’s a safety issue. It’s not pro-gun or anti-gun, it’s not anti-Second Amendment, it is a safety issue; it is simply that.
She then offers an emotional appeal, saying that it was the Newtown shootings and trying to keep her 11-year-old daughter “safe” from the news that motivated her to get involved in the “gun safety” movement. Bote that once again, nothing she proposes would have kept the Newtown shooter from murdering his mother and stealing her guns.
We then start getting some “facts” mixed in with Ms. Moore’s commentary:
Guns have killed 6,303 in 2017 [1]
It looks like those are the figures as of May 31, 2017, so we’re looking at the first five months of this year. But, as with most of the antis’ “facts,” there no context or background are provided. If they are counting all firearm related deaths, then 2017 is starting out quite slowly compared to previous years.
Looking at the WISQARS data from 2011 – 2015 and assuming the rates stay the same over the course of the year (they don’t, but this will give us something to compare to), in an average year 5/12ths of all gun related deaths was a little over 14,000. So, either we are having a really peaceful year, or the antis have finally stopped including suicides to bump up their numbers.
If we pull out the 105,183 suicides from those five years and recalculate we get 5,351.5. A closer examination of the GunViolenceArchive.org data seems to show that they are cheating, just not as badly as usual. It looks like they are counting suicides as “gun deaths” when they are part of a murder/suicide, but not counting stand-alone suicides. So they are only lying a lot, instead of hugely.
The PSA’s next stat is how many people have been injured (12,447) to which I once again reply so what? From 2011 – 2015 the 5/12ths annual average for non-fatal dog bites was almost twelve times that many at 145,611 and there were thirty-eight times as many accidental poisonings (477,796 2/3 on average). Really, people, there are more serious issues out there.
But of course, it wouldn’t be the obligatory tear-jerking, heartstring-pulling BS if we had the proper perspective on that statistic.
Every day 7 children are killed by guns
And once again they are calling anyone aged 0 – 19 “children” and including suicides, whereas if we look at actual children children, you know, the ones from birth to puberty (ages 0 – 13), and remove the suicides, we get 241 per year, or 7 children every 10 ½ days. Still too many, but not nearly as heartbreaking and therefore useless to the antis.
One final number from the PSA that I was certainly shocked to see (again from GVA.org):
So far this year, there have been 143 mass shootings
Holy guacamole, PacMan! That is a huge number of mass murders! Why haven’t I seen anything about this on the news?
The answer is quite simple; they said mass shootings not mass killings. You must scroll all the way down to the bottom of their home page and click on Methodology, then scroll down to the bottom of that page to find their definitions, and they do have some interesting definitions. For mass shooting, we find:
FOUR or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.
So even though the vast majority of the public sees “mass shooting” and thinks “mass murder” GVA’s definition would include four or more people accidentally peppered with birdshot at a skeet range. This would also be considered an instance of “gun violence” because their definition of that term is:
Gun Violence describes the results of all incidents of death or injury or threat with firearms without pejorative judgment within the definition. Violence is defined without intent or consequence as a consideration. To that end a shooting of a victim by a subject/suspect is considered gun violence as is a defensive use or an officer involved shooting. The act itself, no matter the reason is violent in nature.
This is how they would justify counting suicides and self-defense shootings as “gun violence,” because they are oh-so-nobly avoiding “pejorative judgement”.
Nick Leghorn has already dissected GVA.org so I won’t continue with them, but I find it sad that Ms. Moore is using her not inconsiderable talent and fame to bring attention to an almost non-existent problem and call for a completely irrelevant “solution.”
[1] Source: http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ (hereinafter GVA.org)