patrick.net

The "policy research" avoids everything that contradict their narrative https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/child-and-teen-firearm-mortality-in-the-u-s-and-peer-countries/

"The United States has by far the highest rate of child and teen firearm mortality among peer nations."
Here is how this statement is engineers to sound strong and legit.
1. They cherry-picked selected countries as "peer nations" while there are plenty of countries where the guns are banned and the same numbers are higher. e.g. El Salvado, Venezuella, etc

2. They do not look at mortality of children from birth to 1yo because the death rate is higher than from firearms and the narrative falls apart.

3. They do not look at the 18-21 age group since drug overdose tares on. They call it "poisoning" in their charts.

4. They don't talk about death rate from abortions.

"Because there is no comprehensive national firearm registry, it is difficult to track gun ownership in the U.S. Instead, we look at the correlation between the number of child and teen firearm deaths and the number of gun laws in U.S. states (based on the State Firearm Law Database, which is a catalog of the presence or absence of 134 firearm law provisions across all 50 states).

States with more restrictive firearm laws in the U.S. generally have fewer child and teen firearm deaths than states with fewer firearm law provisions. Even so, these states on average have a much higher rate of child and teen firearm deaths than that of Canada and other countries. Among comparably large and wealthy countries, Canada has the second highest child and teen firearm death rate to the U.S. However, Canada generally has more restrictive firearm laws and regulates access to guns at the federal level. In the U.S., guns may be brought to states with strict laws from out-of-state or unregistered sources."

1. The biggest lie is that they sell correlation as causation.

2. They don't tell how they calculate the firearm mortality rate for a group of states. Is that average of averages? How did they decide on the cut-offs?

3. They don't talk about outliers.

The last lie by omission is that they don't talk about organized crime and illegal firearms. The majority of firearms are illegal (400 to 1). The "stricter gun laws" will not fix the organized crime.

In Chicago, the laws got so progressive that cops can not stop and frisk suspicions individuals. And now they point fingers at "gun control legislation".

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In conclusions.. This is just another misleading article to enrage selected audience and to drive the political divide.