Mini-Snopes: Great moments in dishonest charts

A friend shared this chart on Facebook today. At the moment it has 5678 shares. Her source introduced it this way:

(For those that refuse to discuss anything but guns, because guns are the most important issue)
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our passions, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Those bars are impressive and if scaled correctly would be more even more impressive. Gun homicides are truly insignificant viewed like this. However, this view is complete bullshit.

The bottom two bars measure homicides, none of the others do. If you add firearm suicides and accidental, fatal shootings, the gun death numbers triple. If you sort out the others to only homicides what do you get? How many motor vehicle homicides are there per year? Poison homicides? Alcohol, drug, tobacco, or medical homicides? When was the last time you heard of someone charging inro a building and killing twenty plus people with a baseball bat or a cigarette? If the sources of the chart are correct, the first eight lines should all be included in the "Non-firearm" category.

Was the original author dishonest or just unclear on the concept? As a general rule, we should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Here, however, I'm voting for malice. If the author was looking at causes of death in the United States, any source would have listed cancer and heart disease at the top. This dishonesty is especially obvious since the author lists one of his/her/its sources as the Center for Disease Control. If you can't make you case without resorting to lies, then you have no case.

PS - I have never met anyone who refuses to discuss anything but guns as the cause of death.

PPS - One of the commenters at my friend's source smugly says, "It is sad the sheeples believe everything they are told by the media." Sheeple automatically excludes you from any intelligent conversation.

Obama's to-do list

In a few hours it will start being 2016 in the US. As Obama enters his last full year in office, I have to say he's put off too many parts of his agenda until the last minute. He's never going to accomplish all of these in one year. Just look at this list. He needs to:

• Grab all our guns
• Outlaw Christmas
• Start a race war
• Make everyone use Common Core math
• Enact Shariah law
• Send all of the Real Americans (tm) to FEMA reeducation camps
• Play lots of golf
• Abolish golf
• Seize all the Bibles
• Make kids eat their vegetables
• Assign one transgender person to each public restroom and gym shower
• Ban cars
• Invade Texas
• Get whitey
• Declare himself the Messiah
• Something something EBOLA!
• Homosexualize all the children
• Arrest Glenn Beck
• Form a private army out of the Crips and the Bloods
• Suspend the Constitution so he can have a third term
• Import millions of Islamic terrorists
• Give telephones to all the undeserving people
• Make us press 2 for English

It's not going to be easy for Obama to institute his thousand year rule of evil on this schedule. Even now, conservative Facebookers are arming themselves with their most powerful Sam Elliot you-must-be-a-special-kind-of-stupid memes. He's going to need our help to accomplish his full evil agenda. I, for one, pledge to spend every penny George Soros sends me being a PC as I can on social media. What will you do?

Happy Gun Appreciation Day!

You've probably heard that today is Gun Appreciation Day, a stunt concocted by DC media consultant Larry Ward, who is not the same as Larry Ward, the voice of Jabba the Hut. Gun Appreciation Day is the latest in a series of appreciation days announced by conservatives hoping to duplicate the success of Chik-Fil-A Appreciation Day, a stunt cooked up by Mike Huckabee and Fox News to counter a mild boycott of the anti-gay activities of the restaurant's owners. The day drove hundreds of thousands of conservatives to buy chicken sandwiches to show those liberals whats what. It got enormous media coverage, especially on Fox. After they all went home the restaurant quietly announced that they would be changing their policies toward their gay employees. All of the appreciation days since have been miserable failures.

Gun Appreciation Day appears to breaking the losing streak. Ward has tapped into the paranoia felt by so many Second Amendment absolutists since Obama was elected four years ago and that has gone into overdrive since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Ward announced today for GAD, no doubt because it's the closest gun show weekend to the presidential inauguration. It's also two days before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a juxtaposition that many find offensive. Ward handled the criticism like the pro he is explaining that he thought that encouraging people to buy lots of guns was a way of honoring the famous pacifist who was assassinated with a gun in 1968, then he launched into an ahistorical argument about how if we had armed all the slaves we brought over from Africa they would have been able to end slavery themselves.

Controversy sells. GAD has had scads of coverage, even from the gun-hating, mainstream, liberal press. Gun fans held rallies at most state capitals, gun shows across the country are reporting great turnouts, and dealers are making buckets of money by jacking up their prices in anticipation of Obama outlawing all guns and sending jackbooted thugs to the homes of conservative constitutionalists.

So, crowds, sales, rallies, it's all good news right? Mmmmm maybe not.

• In Raleigh, NC, three people, including a sheriff's deputy, were wounded when a shotgun gun accidentally discharged at the show's safety check-in booth.
• In Medina, OH, a gun dealer was checking out a semi-automatic pistol he had just bought shooting an old friend if his in the leg and arm.
• In Indianapolis, IN, a man was loading .45 he had just purchased when ha accidentally shot himself in the hand.
• In Tupelo, MI, an accidental discharge grazed one man and injured a four year-old child with bullet fragments after hitting a wall.
• In Marietta, GA, an man was shot in the ankle by a friend who was showing it to a third person.

For those of you who are counting, that's eight five people injured at five three shows. It's now 5:30 on the west coast and some of these shows go well into the evening, so this might not be the final count. I'm sure this is not the the kind of publicity Ward and his sponsors were hoping for. The gun lobby tells us that more guns in society will make us safer. Gun Appreciation Day is making just the opposite argument.

In the days to come, when talking heads debate gun safety, we will hear lots of harrumphing and sentences that begin "Well, responsible gun owners...." The problem with any argument that includes that phrase is that there are an awful lot of irresponsible people in the world. More people carrying guns means more irresponsible, immature, and clumsy people will be carrying objects that are one oops away from killing someone or maiming them for life.

No one who has any influence on anything is trying to take away your all your guns. The people who are saying that are lying. Some of them are trying to sell you something. Some of them are paranoid extremists. Some of them a trying to keep you scared for political purposes. This madness has to stop.

UPDATE: After making fun of people who don't check the dates on news items, I failed to check the dates on my news items. Two of them did not happen today. The correct count is five people at three events.