Tag: what agenda?

Quote of the Day – Sultan Knish Edition

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Daniel Greenfield, who blogs at Sultan Knish, is also a contributor at FrontPage Mag.  His most recent column No Country for Liberal Republicans is chock-full of QotD material.  Here’s my selection for today’s serving:

In the last two elections, the bloodthirsty neo-confederate party of hate served up a liberal Republican, currently championing Obama’s illegal alien amnesty, and a liberal Republican, currently being blamed  by Obama supporters for inspiring ObamaCare. Its fantasy candidate for the upcoming election had spent the last election hugging Obama, and then signed off on tuition for illegal aliens and banned gay conversion therapy, and was, until a few weeks ago, being praised as the ultimate good Republican; only to be subjected to the same ritual media humiliations as McCain and Romney.

The same media that insisted that the murder of four Americans in Benghazi was not a scandal and that the murder of Brian Terry in Operation Fast and Furious was not a scandal is bleating that a little traffic is a scandal.  Not a little traffic in assault rifles, as in Fast and Furious, but in the distance between cars.

By all means, do read the whole thing.

Another Box-Office Loser

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So Harvey Weinstein has announced that he’s going to make a new film, starring Meryl Streep:

Mr. Weinstein then revealed his secret project about the gun rights group. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll tell it to you, Howard,” he said. “I’m going to make a movie with Meryl Streep, and we’re going to take this head-on. And they’re going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them.”

“This” and “them” being “guns” and “the NRA.”

Perhaps Mr. Weinstein should read Brian Anse Patrick’s The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage.

Nah. Let him waste other people’s money.

UPDATE:  Saw this over at Bubba’s:

What Happens When the Media Narrative™ on Gun Control Loses Traction?

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They go back to scaaaaary numbers!  And they beat their drums made from the skins of dead children.

Terrible tally: 500 children dead from gunshots every year, 7,500 hurt, analysis finds

That’s the headline. Here’s the first line of the piece (emphasis mine):

About 500 American children and teenagers die in hospitals every year after sustaining gunshot wounds — a rate that climbed by nearly 60 percent in a decade, according to the first-ever accounting of such fatalities, released Sunday.

Children and teens – which includes 18 and 19 year-old “children” who are legally adults.

But wait! It gets better!

In addition, an estimated 7,500 kids are hospitalized annually after being wounded by gunfire, a figure that spiked by more than 80 percent from 1997 to 2009, according two Boston doctors presenting their findings at a conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics, held in Orlando, Fla.

Eight of every 10 firearm wounds were inflicted by handguns, according to hospital records reviewed by the doctors. They say the national conversation about guns should shift toward the danger posed by smaller weapons, not the recent fights over limiting the availability of military-style, semi-automatic rifles.

So the urgent need to reinstate the assault weapon ban is not so urgent after all?

Just as an aside, I did a Google search on the name of one of the authors, Dr. Arin L. Madenci. Google returned 9,380 hits. The first eight pages are almost exclusively this announcement. Of the dozen or so stories I scanned, not one had a link to the actual report, just the database that spawned it.

So let’s look at some numbers.

The NBC piece states:

Madenci, and his colleague, Dr. Christopher Weldon, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, tallied the new statistics by culling a national database of 36 million pediatric hospitalizations from 1997 to 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available.
During that period, hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.

Wait – “aged 20 and younger? I thought we were talking “children and teens”?

The Centers for Disease Control has a tool, WISQARS, which stands for Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System. It has subsections on fatal injury, non-fatal injury, and violent injury statistics, though the last covers only sixteen states and is “not nationally representative.” That’s OK though. The fatal and non-fatal statistics can be searched by “violence-related” or “unintentional.” The CDC numbers go through 2010.

In 1997, according to the CDC, for “children” aged 0-19 there were 4,223 gunshot fatalities, not 317. Apparently the overwhelming majority of these gunshot fatalities never made it to a hospital. The non-fatal data only goes back to 2000, so I can’t do a comparison, but you’d think they’d want to use the higher number. But here’s the interesting part where this “news” piece becomes an opinion piece without bothering to inform you of the fact:  of the total of 1,005 words in the NBC piece, the first 298 of them are about the study and its results. The remaining 707 are about how you should feel about it. They relate to the tragic death of 3-year-old Will McAnaul who died from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound. As I have said before, this is the kind of thing that really irritates me. As I said then:
 Now, what are you to infer from this? You are to infer that the majority of these injuries and deaths are accidental, are you not?

Let’s look at the CDC’s numbers in more depth.

For 1997, children 0-12 years of age, gunshot fatalities: 318
Unintentional: 84
Violence-related (includes suicide): 226
Known suicide: 20

Eighty-four accidental deaths. Over two hundred homicides.

For 1997, children 13-19, gunshot fatalities: 3,905 (12.63/100,000 population)
Unintentional: 222
Violence related: 3,616
Suicide: 1,242

That means 2,374 were homicides.

Let’s jump to 2009.

Children 0-12, gunshot fatalities: 209
Unintentional: 44
Violence-related: 156
Suicide: 14

Age 13-19 total gunshot fatalities: 2,502 (8.25/100,000 population)
Unintentional: 90
Violence-related: 2,383
Suicide: 735

Excuse me?

The story plainly states that:

…hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.

But the Centers for Disease Control data also plainly states that the total “firearm deaths” of children aged from birth to nineteen years of age went from 4,223 to 2,811 – a decrease of 1,412 in raw numbers and a death rate decrease of almost 63%.  Accidental death by gunshot dropped by 60%.

And all of this in the face of expanding “shall-issue” concealed-carry legislation, and at least four million new guns being purchased each year – at least half of them handguns.

The CDC numbers are far higher than those used by Doctors Arin L. Madenci and Christopher Weldon, and they are nothing to be proud of, but they trend DOWN, and dramatically. You can’t frighten people with declining statistics. Instead, they had to find numbers they could cherry-pick to support The Narrative™ that guns are a disease vector, and that more guns = more “gun deaths.”

And every news service in the country, and many more worldwide picked up the “story” (and I use that word with dripping sarcasm) and ran with it.

LAYERS of editorial fact-checking!!

Agenda?  What agenda?

Remember, they’re The Other Side.  It’s what they do.  It’s all they do.  And they absolutely will not stop.

So we can’t either.

UPDATE: NBC reporter Bill Briggs, who wrote the linked article, is on Facebook. I asked him about his story. Specifically, I asked:  “Mr. Briggs, I read your piece. Don’t you guys have fact checkers?”  His response:

The study conducted by these surgical residents came from the first-ever data mining of firearms injuries/deaths from this statistical set (KID). It warrants coverage. We noted in the article that this pediatric database typically includes anyone 20 and under (although for one year of data, the cut off was younger). We typically try to put faces and personal stories with any numbers reported in all our stories, no matter the topic.

I asked him:

Doesn’t it bother you – even a little – that they reported a significant increase in fatalities (317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009) while the Centers for Disease Control reported a significant DECREASE in fatalities (and a MUCH higher total count)? Does that not tell you that the KID statistical set is pretty much USELESS for the purpose they put it to (if you don’t assume that their purpose was to push gun control)? Doesn’t THAT “warrant coverage”? Doesn’t it make you ask “Why”?

We’ll see if he replies.

UPDATE II:  He did.  Here’s the remainder of the exchange:

Yes, we cover all those trend lines.

Also, if you read the abstract written by these two surgeons, you’ll note that they are not pushing a social agenda. They speak to the statistics from a clinical perspective. They only venture slightly down that road when citing the higher percentage of handgun injuries in contrast to ongoing debates about so-called assault rifles.

Bill, where was the link to the abstract in your piece? I saw links only to the KID website and to Patcine McAnaul’s blog. (And though you chose Will McAnaul as the face for your story, I think even you would admit that stating his case “may” have been one included in the data is stretching it. He was “declared dead” at the hospital, not admitted.)

I saw no mention of “trend lines” other than “hospitalizations of kids and teens aged 20 and younger from gunshot wounds jumped from 4,270 to 7,730. Firearm deaths of children logged by hospitals rose from 317 in 1997 to 503 in 2009, records showed.”

With respect to the doctors, you don’t find this comment suggestive? “Policies designed to reduce the number of household firearms, especially handguns, may more effectively reduce the number of gunshot injuries in children,” Madenci said.

This INSISTS that “the number of gunshot injuries in children” is INCREASING – an assertion BELIED by the CDC data that says it’s DECREASING – dramatically – WITHOUT such “policies” despite the increasing number of firearms in private hands – especially handguns.

In short, your piece provides false information in support of a false narrative, but it “warrants coverage” while the truth – as uncomfortable as it is – does not.

And you wonder why people no longer trust the media?

Thank you for your thoughts. The American Academy of Pediatrics can offer additional information on this research.

Thank you for your responses.

As my daughter said to me tonight on the telephone, “I kept waiting for him to respond, and he never did.”

But When a Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations…

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Let’s see…

First there was the “Barrycading” of the WWII Memorial, Vietnam Memorial and Lincoln Memorial, and the not-so barricading of the WWI Memorial.  Then there was the not-National Park that was closed by the National Park Service, and the parking lots for Mt. Vernon were closed, even though Mt. Vernon is also not run by the Park Service.  Then the National Park Service evicted people from their homes and houseboats on Lake Mead.  If that’s not petty enough for you:

The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.

But there’s more!  Unknown to me before today, I discovered that the Pentagon spent $5.5 billion in the days leading up to the “government shutdown,” and  I was told today by a reliable source that the Marine Air Station in Yuma, Arizona has been “flying every aircraft in its inventory” over the last several days – beginning last Friday.  Also apparently the “government shutdown” has caused Catholic priests in military (to) face arrest for celebrating Mass.

And in what is quite possibly the single greatest example of .gov hubris in modern history,

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was “closed” due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

Yup. The government is trying to close the ocean.

As one Park Ranger has been quoted:

We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.

This shot pretty much sums up the whole thing for me:

photo Lincoln_outrage.jpg
I was blog-surfing tonight, and I visited /var/log/otto as I do about once a week or so. In Otto’s post from Thursday, Fence Sitting is No Longer an Option was this:

This morning on the radio they played clips of Obama and company comparing Republicans and Tea Partiers to terrorists … I was in the car with my wife – who doesn’t actively follow the political scene, but she’s not ignorant either – and after hearing the clips she said, “He’s trying to start a civil war.” And you know, I don’t think she’s wrong. He has to frame it correctly, of course, he can’t look like the bad guy, but he’s got the American media in his pocket, they are his puppets and they do what he says. The international scene is a distraction from what he wants to do- crush the American way and any who would defend it. He doesn’t attack any international crisis with the relish and enthusiasm he attacks and mocks his political enemies. I say Obama, but he has a huge array of like-minded comrades both in and out of government. They are a real and present danger. They want an uprising so they can crush it. I don’t doubt this any longer.

It certainly appears that way. The Media Narrative™ is that hordes of violent, racist TEA Partiers who hate the .gov and have been stockpiling weapons and ammunition are just waiting for the spark that will give rise to anti-government riots.

And Obama has fired up the grinder and is throwing all the sparks he possibly can.

I don’t see another explanation, do you?

Edited to add:  Brietbart has a more complete list of closures and other idiocy.

Update, 10/7:

Folks who live in the Great Smoky Mountains have just about reached their breaking point with the federal government.

“It’s almost like they are pushing to see how far they can push before the American people say enough is enough,” said Ed Mitchell, the mayor of Blount County, Tenn.

Almost?

“We were founded on a declaration of independence. And they are about to push the people to the line again.”

Nearly a third of Blount County is inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So when the federal government shut down the park, it also shut down one of the area’s chief sources of revenue.

The National Park Service also closed the Foothills Parkway, a major thoroughfare in the county. The closure came without warning and left the local school district scrambling to get children back to their homes.

The children live in the eastern Tennessee community of Top of the World – serviced by School Bus 49. Normally, the bus travels along the Foothills Parkway. Other roads leading to the isolated mountain community are impassible by bus.

“It’s dangerous,” said Nancy Kemp, the spokesperson for Blount County Schools. “It’s very curvy and straight up the mountain. It’s just not a safe route.”

One local resident told Knoxville television station WBIR that the alternative roads are “white knuckle routes.”

“White knuckle”? That’s RACIST!

So much for “Doing it for the CHIIILLLDDDREN! Of course, if a busload of kids dies in a horrible accident, the media will report it as being the fault of House Republicans the TEA Party.

As Instapundit says:

If the press covered Obama the way they’d cover a GOP President who did this kind of thing, he’d be toast. But they don’t, because they’re on his team. Just think of them as Dem operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

No Shame

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Obama in July, 2008:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydZTHPkOnvE?rel=0]
Obama in September, 2013:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58zamUOSPxk?start=102]

Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times,
does not increase our debt.

Then why do we need to raise the ceiling? Aren’t we again “taking out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children” and “driving up the national debt”? What’s different now?

The difference is, now he’s the President, and under his administration, the national debt has increased from $10.5 trillion in November of 2008 to over $16.9 trillion today, some $200 billion over the current “ceiling,” – but through accounting sleight-of-hand by the Treasury, it’s been “officially” stuck at $16,699,396,000,000 since mid-May,  an interesting tidbit the MSM hasn’t found interesting enough to comment on.

It’s like they’re protecting him or something.

Steven Den Beste Returns

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In a rare political post on his anime blog Chizumatic, Steven opines on the media’s reaction to the current Washington scandals in See no Evil.  My only disagreement with Steven comes from this excerpt:

So even though we’re increasingly uncomfortable acting as a shill for the government instead of as an opposing force, the way we always thought the press was supposed to be, …

The press doesn’t take that position. The press has an administrative control bias that is decidedly Leftist in slant. They’re an “opposing force” only when the wrong people are in charge, or are doing something that the New York Times editors don’t agree with.  The rest of the time they see their job as conveying the divine grace of government to the laypeople of the public.

Other than that, spot-on.

Perhaps now someone in addition to Sharyl Atkisson of ABCNNBCBS will do some actual reporting.

DECLINING GUN OWNERSHIP!!

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OK, I’ve covered this topic before, but since it seems to be one of the Democratic Talking Points™ being parroted widely these days, time to take it up again.

A recent survey announced (and was touted by the media):

The share of American households with guns has declined over the past four decades, a national survey shows, with some of the most surprising drops in the South and the Western mountain states, where guns are deeply embedded in the culture.

The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.

The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.

The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.

And again:

The number of US households with guns has dropped 15 percent since the 1970s, from 50 percent the population’s households to 35 percent, according to a new survey.

And again:

All the stories about people rushing out to buy guns after recent mass shootings may give the impression that more Americans have guns at home. Yet a survey reveals that the percentage of U.S. homes with a gun has been in steady decline over the past four decades, with a surprisingly sharp drop in the South and Western mountain states. Whereas an average of 50 percent of households owned a gun in the 1970s, that number declined to 35 percent in the 2000s, with 34 percent of households reporting gun ownership in 2012, notes the New York Times.

And again:

When we see attendance at gun shows and reports of brisk gun sales at gun stores, it’s easy to get the impression that a larger percentage of Americans are choosing to purchase firearms. There is, however, ample evidence to the contrary — even as gun sales go up, the percentage of households with guns goes down.

ad infinitum. As goes The New York Times, so goes the world they say.

The Wall Street Journal had, I think, the most balanced opinion piece on the subject, Guns Present Polling Conundrum. I recommend you read the whole thing, but here are some pertinent excerpts:

Press clippings over the last 25 years show reported counts of gun owners fluctuating from 44 million up to 192 million, with dozens of different figures cited, some in the same year, and some — such as the 192 million figure — the result of confusing estimates of guns in American households with counts of gun owners, some of whom own more than one gun.

The polling discrepancies have baffled pollsters.

—

Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, said he also expected question wording to explain the difference: “I was sure we’d find the answer there.” However, Dimock said “you don’t see those things having a consistent effect” — some ask very similar gun questions and get very different estimates. “It’s certainly to me one of the biggest polling puzzles I’ve come across in the last few years.”

“Nobody’s really explained why they come up with such dramatic differences,” Aaron Karp, senior consultant to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey and senior lecturer in political science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., said of pollsters.

—

Who answers the phone in the household could affect responses. “We know that in a survey where respondents are randomly selected from adults in the household, a household headed by a married couple is substantially more likely to report guns in the home if the husband is selected than if the wife is selected,” said Philip Cook, an economist and gun-violence researcher at Duke University.

Also, some gun owners may be reluctant to tell researchers they own guns, because of legal and political considerations, which makes the question more like behavioral or attitudinal questions than like questions that ask basic facts about respondents. “This is an unusual demographic-type question,” said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup.

I’m reminded of the Slate piece by Emily Yoffe, the “human guinea pig,” in her piece Guinea Get Your Gun: How I learned to love guns:

So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.

Lest his son be kicked out of nursery school. Yeah, there’s real incentive to admit gun ownership!  (Do read that whole piece.  Her experience is what scares the piss out of The Other Side™ – guns ARE fun!)

The Gallup poll they reference is this one – Self-Reported Gun Ownership in U.S. is Highest Since 1993, which concluded in 2011:

Forty-seven percent of American adults currently report that they have a gun in their home or elsewhere on their property. This is up from 41% a year ago and is the highest Gallup has recorded since 1993, albeit marginally above the 44% and 45% highs seen during that period.

That’s just a hair below the 50% Gallup reported in 1991. And it adds this tidbit:

The new result comes from Gallup’s Oct. 6-9 Crime poll, which also finds public support for personal gun rights at a high-water mark. Given this, the latest increase in self-reported gun ownership could reflect a change in Americans’ comfort with publicly stating that they have a gun as much as it reflects a real uptick in gun ownership.

So we have one side insisting – and I quote: “More guns, fewer homes,” and “Number of US households with guns drops 15 percent,” etc., etc., but what do the numbers actually say? Well, if we take the General Social Survey results at face value, the percentage of households containing a firearm has dropped from 50% in 1970 to 35% in 2012. According to this site, the NUMBER of U.S. households has increased from 63.5 million in 1970 to 114.8 million in 2010. That’s a net increase in households containing firearms of 8,430,000. If Gallup is right and the percentage has declined from 50% in 1991 to 47% in 2011, then the total number of households containing a gun has increased by – again – just over eight million, but in a much shorter period. The discrepancy between the two estimates is right at 13.8 million households.

Either way, there were apparently eight million more households in 2011-12 with firearms than there were at some time in the past.

And yet violent crime, homicide, suicide AND accidental deaths by firearm have declined year-by-year for over a decade.

Now, when I walked the floor at the NRA convention in Houston last weekend, I took time to speak with several vendors and some people I saw walking the show, asking them how business had been for them.  One such vendor was Aaron Ludwig of Action Target, the company that recently rebuilt the indoor range at NRA headquarters in Fairfax, VA.  I asked Mr. Ludwig how business had been doing for Action Target year-on-year.  He informed me that when he joined the company ten years ago, annual sales were $15 million.  Last year the company did $100 million in sales.  Robert Lewis of EAR Inc. said they’d just had their best year ever.  I stopped Susan Rexrode and Natalie Levasseur of Shooting for Women Alliance as they were walking down an aisle in front of me because they were both wearing vests with “Instructor” embroidered on them.  SFWA has, they informed me, trained over 10,000 women since its inception.  They’ll train men, too, but the men MUST be accompanied by a woman.  Business has been so good they are planning to expand this year. I’ve already quoted Kathy Jackson of The Cornered Cat on her training business’s success. Jeff K. of Magpul Industries of course reported that they’re selling everything they can make.  Their shipping department has grown from four people to ten, and they still can’t keep up.  The CCI representative for their ammunition manufacturing division stated the same concerning ammunition – demand has been steadily increasing until the recent overwhelming demand – and no, the .gov isn’t actually buying more ammo than they normally do – at least not from CCI/Speer.

I personally know two people who recently went into business making holsters for a living.  They’re doing well, too.

The NRA Annual Meeting and Exhibits increased its floorspace this year to 440,000 square feet from 340,000 square feet last year.  I believe them.  I walked the whole thing.  Attendance was up, too, from 70,000+ last year to over 86,000 this year.  I believe that too – it was wall-to-wall people all day Saturday.  I cannot imagine where they all parked.  Membership has reportedly surged as well, to 5 million.

And then, on top of all of this, comes the undeniable fact that guns are being sold at record rates, and have been for several years.  Yet we’re supposed to believe that the number of people who own guns is declining?

On what planet?