It’s increasingly clear that gun control activism thrives on ignorance about the nature of crime and the importance of the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, far too many Americans continue to buy — hook, line, and sinker — into activists’ mischaracterizations of reality.
Take, for example, one recent survey that discovered a shocking number of American voters erroneously believe that school shootings cause more gun deaths every year than gang violence.
In reality, even when using the broadest possible definition of “school shooting,” such events are far too rare to plausibly constitute a leading cause of gun deaths. Gang-related gun deaths outpace school shooting deaths by several orders of magnitude.
It’s just that gun control activists are content with misleading Americans about the nature of criminal gun violence.
At the same time, they intentionally downplay the protective function of the Second Amendment, dismissing lawful defensive gun use as uncommon and promoting baseless assertions that gun owners are more likely to have their guns turned against them by criminals than they are to successfully stop a violent attack.
That’s because the truth about defensive gun use undermines their demands for more restrictions on lawful gun ownership.
Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
— Amy Swearer in Defensive Gun Use Debunks Gun Control Ignorance
The wonder of the digital age. Readily available data that can be quickly disseminated before it gets “corrected”. AI is probably in a rush to deployment to help “sort” the data for us so we don’t focus on “noise” that “experts” insist are irrelevant.
DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssist beta AI works pretty good for now. It won’t attempt certain politically charged questions.
I asked it if there are more school shootings than gang shootings. The answer:
School shootings are a specific type of gun violence that occur in educational settings, while gang shootings typically involve criminal activities and rivalries. Overall, gang-related shootings are more prevalent than school shootings in the U.S., as they account for a significant portion of gun violence incidents.
After Covid especially i realize any new tech/information compiler will have a period of legitimate functional accuracy to build confidence in it’s user base before being used against them. Just a matter of who is doing the lying and why.
I remember checking the CDC often in the early days of Covid. I thought they were there to help us. Covid was a real eye opener.
…a shocking number of American voters erroneously believe [fill in the blank]…
In other news, propaganda still works. How else could they have people voting for a senile puppet as the president?