Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
As a Democrat, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi doesn’t usually get a lot of guff from the media. She can pretty much do and say whatever she wants.
But only to a point.
At some point, even the media has to call her on her BS. In their feeble attempt to appear unbiased, some comments are so egregious that they can’t look away any longer, especially when it’s a repeated flub.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) repeated use of a bogus claim of gun deaths of children throughout the year has earned her four Pinocchios by the Washington Post fact-checker.
The fact-checker was alerted by a reader who found the figures Pelosi was citing — that 47 percent of gun violence deaths in the U.S. were teenagers or younger.
“In the 266 days since we sent this bill, about 25,000 people have died from gun violence in our country, 47 percent of them teenagers or children younger than that.”
Now, a spokesperson for Pelosi argues that she misspoke and that it was 47 children killed per day, citing a Brady study. Of course, this is a huge difference, yet if we’re honest with ourselves, an understandable one. People do screw up from time to time, especially when they’re used to talking about percentages.
However, it seems that even that information is wrong.
Connelly told the Post that the statistic was drawn from a study by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which averaged five years of data — 2012-2016 — from the CDC.
But Brady’s five-year data indicate that 7.3 percent of the people in the United States who die every day because of firearms are 19 and younger. (The number killed is seven a day.) In terms of people being shot, teenagers and young children account for about 14 percent of the total.
Even the most charitable of interpretations of Pelosi’s comments, however, have to recognize the difference between seven and 47. Further, as the fact-checker found, she’s repeated this number over and over again. In other words, she’s been pushing this false information for some time. She’s gotten away with it because no one at the Washington Post wanted to confront her on it. It wasn’t until she flubbed up and said 47 percent that they couldn’t look away.
Here’s the problem, though. How many other people are spouting “facts” that aren’t even related to the studies they’re citing and are getting away with it? The fact-checkers aren’t checking all the facts. In fairness, that’s a tall order, and I get that they can’t do everything. Yet we also saw these same fact-checkers swooping in to check whether President Trump actually gave a medal to a dog. That, they had time for.
Anti-gunners are constantly spouting supposed facts, and we know good and well that they’re bull. Of course, they’re typically spouting bogus studies or citing outfits using definitions that support their agendas rather than anything unbiased, but Pelosi had been saying this exact thing for a while, and no one called her on it, no one at all.
And the media wonders why we don’t take them seriously anymore.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/
https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/01/03/washington-post-smack-pelosi-down/