“U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, is one of California’s most prominent advocates for gun control — and one of the few members of Congress to personally experience and survive gun violence,” politifact.com reports. “Speier was shot five times at point blank range in 1978 on a trip accompanying Rep. Leo Ryan to Jonestown, the remote commune in Guyana where 909 people died from cyanide poisoning and other means.” Died from cyanide poisoning?
In fact, the Jonestown community committed mass suicide at the behest of a religious fanatic. But that’s how politically biased “fact checkers” roll: in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion, they forget the bit of the oath that says “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” They cherry-pick, prevaricate or, in this case, simply ignore the facts they unearth.
Exhibit A: here’s what PolitiFact found when they tried to verify Rep. Speier’s stat in the Tweet above:
A spokeswoman for Speier cited the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as the source of the statistic. She said the campaign used information from an online database of fatal injury report maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We did not hear back from a spokesman for the Brady Campaign . . .
To examine Speier’s claim, we searched the database for the number of young people who died in connection with guns from the start of 2013 through 2015. Those are the most recent available years following the Sandy Hook shooting.
We found 7,838 deaths in connection with firearms for people ages 0 through 19.
That works out to 7.15 deaths a day during this three-year period — which matches Speier’s claim of “more than seven” per day.
These include all types of gun deaths from accidents to homicides to suicides. About 36 percent resulted from suicides.
Some might take issue with Speier lumping in 18 year-olds and 19 year-olds as children.
And for good reason. According to legal-dictionary thefreedictionary.com, a child is “a person 14 years and under” (as distinguished from a “minor” who is “anyone under 18 in almost all states”).
If we re-examine the numbers in the CDC database to reflect this fact, we discover that 1,312 children died from firearms-related injuries in the two-year period. Which is 656 per year. Or 1.79 per day.
That’s roughly four times less than the number claimed by the Brady Campaign and Rep. Speier. Despite discovering hard factual data that completely undermines both the Brady Campaign and Rep. Speier’s claim, PolitFact decides to accept it.
Our ruling
California Congresswoman Jackie Speier recently claimed: “Since the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than seven children PER DAY have died from gun violence.”
Speier’s claim is backed up by the CDC’s fatal injury report data, which shows an average of 7.15 young people per day, aged 0 to 19, died in connection with firearms between 2013 and 2015 . . .
Speier’s statement is on the right track. But it could have used some clarifications.
We rate it Mostly True.
And we rate it complete bullshit. The Brady Campaign redefined the word “child” to pump-up the CDC’s stats to suit their political agenda.
And what of the misleading meaning of the words “gun violence”? Are suicides examples of “gun violence”? I’d bet dollars to donuts that the average person believes the term refers to firearms-related homicides. As The Brady Campaign knows well enough.
Anyway, twisting words and stats to mislead people isn’t truth or even “mostly” truth — no matter how “noble” the goal. It’s propaganda. You might even call it “fake news.” Speaking of which . . .
Facebook has announced that they’re going to rely on four “fact checking” organizations — Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News and PolitiFact — to weed out “fake news.” What does that tell you about the future of gun news on Facebook?
“Mostly True” is a lot like “a little pregnant”. It’s yes or no, and no in between.
To be fair this is them saying, “most of what has been stated is true” however I do agree in your spirit of the argument: the overall point, or the claim used to substantiate that point, should be an overall “true” or “false”. They can them claim T/F on other points also made one by one, and note ones they noticed, but did not look into.
Of course that’s a bit too much for them and it weakens their ability to control the narrative. Mr. Farago is so very right, and I sometimes forget it’s, “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” that is so important. If there’s extra fluff around it, or other lies and misinformation, then it’s not the truth as we know it. Perhaps they should be held to task on that, even if they include the truth, surrounding it with lies and it’s manipulation and coercion of the truth, if not just a lie by omission, which is all just as good as being false.
To the dems “a little pregnant” is a valid argument. You can’t fix stupid.
“You can’t fix stupid.”
Yes, oh, yes you can. It requires testicular and-or ovarian fortitude, however.
(Translation – It’s not currently a politically viable choice…)
“(Translation – It’s not currently a politically viable choice…)”
That may change on January 20th. Here’s Hoping (but I’m not holding my breath).
“That may change on January 20th. Here’s Hoping (but I’m not holding my breath).”
I just today came across *very* interesting tid-bit of news with some very *serious* implications:
“A federal appeals court for the District of Columbia has breathed new life into the Hillary email-gate scandal which will be music to the ears of Trump’s “lock her up” supporters.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-28/federal-appeals-court-revives-hillary-email-case-leaving-decision-trumps-attorney-ge
This just may be *huge*. Contrary to recent popular belief, as far as I know, Trump has never *definitely* stated he wouldn’t prosecute Hillary.
His answers to that question have been along the lines of ” I don’t think so.”, “I don’t really want to.”, ect.
Never a flat “No.” Trump has a rep of being non-committal until he decides something. Obama can hand her a pardon for past crimes, but *not* future crimes.
That is important – They haven’t yet started digging into the Clinton Foundation personal slush-fund yet. Trump can truthfully say with a straight face that new information has surfaced, and needs to be investigated.
Trump isn’t a stupid as the left thinks he is. He’s fully aware of that chunk of tasty red meat he can throw to his base.
Trump is powered by his ego. Being elected president was big, but being *re-elected* president is much better.
If he prosecutes Hillary, that just about guarantees his base will re-elect him.
Drag Hillary, Huma, Cheryl Mills and others in for a chat with the FBI. They can’t answer every question with “I can’t recall.” They know just how that would look to a jury, and that’s right where she will be going if she refuses to talk to the FBI. 🙂 Nail her for lying to the FBI. Ask Martha Stewart how well that worked for her.
Nail that fat, lying sack of sh!t’s hide to the side of the metaphorical barn. 🙂
Here’s a statistic that’s mot just “mostly true”, but verifiable fact:
“Planned Parenthood aborted 888 babies every single day in 2014.”
http://www.frc.org/plannedparenthoodfacts
And you can be certain that they have continued that statistic every single day since then. Sandy Hook was 20 children in one day in December, 2014, 868 children less than Planned Parenthood killed that same day.
Want to fix the “Seven Children Per Day” statistic, make it a 20 year sentence to recruit anyone under the age of 20 into a criminal organization.
Make it illegal to be a communist.
While I agree with your sentiment, that would be equally as effective as ‘Gun Free Zones” and all other supposed “gun control” (Second Amendment Infringement) laws. They are already criminals engaged in criminal enterprises for which the use of firearms and the recruitment of children are necessary business. That and the FACT that prosecutors would plea-bargain that charge away to get a guilty plea on some other offense, then the prisons would let them out early and send them back to the same neighborhoods they came from, only better educated in the ways of the criminal world and with “street cred”.
Be mellow, Cliff, his suggestion was in the same spirit as our usual “outlaw murder” suggestions. As in, “tongue in cheek”.
I have enhanced my calm.
Why, one wonders, does the measuring start: “…since Sandy hook?”
Could it be a way to wave the bloody shirt w/o getting called on doing so? A way to argue that “Something, (meaning “anything” -ed) must be done?” A way for the politi-bot to claim she’s just the guy to do it? There wouldn’t be a election coming up, would there?
Sometimes there’s a need for a really stupid, and pointless gesture to be made, on somebody’s part.
“U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, is one of California’s most prominent advocates for Second Amendment infringement…” FIFY
Sad, but not surprising.
Facebook = FAKE NEWS.
Just think of all the evil POS that would have proliferated from this POS organization if Hillary had won. All of this “fake news” nonsense was concocted pre-election with the intent on clamping down (with censorship) on real-er-ish news organizations like Brietbart.
Zuckerschmuck was hoping to rule (under Communist China f-sticks) the “world”. Now he’s going to be sidelined (again, under Communist China f-sticks).
It’s the same thing with the Israel ruling by the UN, they had that sh_t in the works for more than a year and thought that Hillary could just gloss that over, but Trump will reverse it, and (if we’re way lucky) tell the UN to get the F out of the U.S.
Let the UN’s POS of the world try their stupid sh_t someplace else for a year (like Grenada) let’s see how many f-stains show up for that one.
Without US participation, financially or otherwise.
Right !
Let’s see the POS’s drag their kids across the Atlantic to where they can’t run up $256K in parking tickets or jeopardize their parents diplomatic status with their behavior.
Let’s shut down the Russian embassy too. They pull about 5 dead guys out of that place a year. Maybe Russia will reciprocate by shutting down California’s embassy.
Nice pic.
beotch looks like she’s under duress.
You ok honey? If you’re being held hostage, start your next shaming hashtag pic paper with the letter “I”.
So….the fact is the Jackie doesn’t want to end gun violence, she wants your guns then she’s coming for your kool aid. To lay claim she knows gun violence being shot in a third world shit hole and that translates into imposing gun control on a Republic…women have no business governing men.
Thank the men who design armaments so the common man/woman can administer, taking no more effort than eight pounds of trigger pull, ruthless violence against a criminal.
“… she wants your guns then she’s coming for your kool aid.”
Wyler’s Grape Flavor-Aid, actually… 🙂
“Speier was shot five times at point blank range in 1978 on a trip . . . to Jonestown”
That’s damn poor shooting if you ask me.
Beats NYPD, though…
She was shot BECAUSE she was going to Jonestown. In this particular instance, correlation=causation.
I find including suicide as “gun violence” a typical misleading practice of anti-gun organizations. A standard tactic when stating how bad “violent gun death” statistics are. Most rescent statements I have seen is that “30,000+ deaths per year from gun violence”. Conveniently lost in this statistic is that approximately 20K are from suicide, approximately 1200K are justifiable homicides, and approximately 8.8K from murders. Just a technique to “pump up” the numbers in an era when the number of murders has dropped approximately 66% since mid 1990’s. I reject suicide by gun as “gun violence”….its tragic, but not “violence”. It is self inflicted. It is not called “knife violence”, “pill violence”, “car violence”, “gravity violence”, or “rope violence” when a person commits suicide with a knife, drug overdose, car, jumping from a building, or hangs themselves.
You neglected to mention that the majority of those 8800 (or whatever) homicides is bangers killing bangers over drug territory, would like to see that number multiplied.
Are our 19 y/o soldiers considered children then?
And why are we letting children vote?
Because due to immaturity and nievety, they overwhelmingly vote demtard. The entire reason for the 26rh Amendment (and the 19th).
Children in the united states are special cookies. Parents don’t raise their kids anymore, they don’t know hard work anymore, and they never build fortitude of any kind. All parenting and educational responsibilities have been dumped onto secular ‘schools’.
Most of my peers were 17-19 and had the mental maturity of a children, the USMC only re-enforced it. Kids fresh out of high school getting a government check on the first and fifteenth every month, alcohol everywhere, shit gets stupid real quick. DUIs all the time, women in the barracks, every other month it was a sexual assault brief.
When the drunken stupidity became too much for me, I ended up sleeping in the enlisted-club until it closed, then moved behind the building onto the pavement because the wi-fi never turns off.
The majority of our soldiers & marines aren’t totally children, but they aren’t everything they should be at that age. You start seeing sense develop around 25+ or SGT/1st LT and up. I didn’t enlist until I was 20, turned 21 in boot. Thankfully none of my DIs caught that one, others just opened their mouths and its time to be special!
– Ramblings of a retired grunt.
There is an element of truth here. After 8 years in the air wing fixing jets the Corps called my bluff and made your truly a LT. My greatest fear was acting like a SGT with gold bars on the collar and upon landing in H&S at Q town nursing a fractured leg bone, was horrified at the NJP board, must of been 50 out of 800 awaiting a chat with the CO. I cannot recall more than 2 up for NJP in 8 years of wrenching on jets. Got reassigned to Marine Corps marathon and asked my Captain why so many in NJP? He response, ASVAB scores…you’ve spent eight years working with smart Marines, now your working with your standard A1 MARK II Jarhead and need to lower your expectations.
wow FAKE NEWS’d (previous post delete.)
RESTATED. Jimmy Carter POS (D) was urged by Harvey Milk [http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=19042] et al to support the reputation for POS (D) Jim Jones mass-murderer by encouraged suicide who also had the Rep. and the lady pictured above shot SO IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB. Jimmy Carter goes to Guyana nearly yearly, and NOT in remembrance of anything.
Harvey Milk evil POS (D) was shot a month later in CA with Mayor Moscone also evil POS (D).
Politifact needs math checkers for its fact checkers. But maths is reeeally hard.
Actually…..Jim Jones was a communist…he was using religion to spread communism….many people to this day think it was a religious community…it wasn’t…he supported all the worst communist dictators……..look him up on Wikipedia…..
You are 100% correct.
It was only after the “revolutionary suicide” did the media start propagating the lie that the people’s temple were religious fanatics.
The MF pictured above has a POS “(D)” after her name. Her party’s platform’s major plank is BRUTAL INFANTICIDE (Abortion) where the product (of abortion) of little dead people are divided up and sold for medicine, experimentation, AND FOOD. The (D) party is in receipt of and regularly uses THE PROCEEDS OF INFANTICIDE TO FUND ALL OF THE OTHER EVIL SH_T THAT THEY PULL.
FU evil POS liberal_progressive_communist_gloabalist [&] (D) for all the sh_t you spread.
Eat sh_t and live.
If you are a (D) you are her.
Soooo….. a liberal politician was only mostly lying???? I got my shocked face on.
Please please please let kommiefornia leave the union.
I would never rely on “Politifact” for anything honest.
2AGuy is right, Jim Jones wasn’t a religious man or even a Christian. He was a communist, he just used Christianity to lure victims… er… members.
He also rubbed shoulders with Jimmy Carter, Harvey Milk and a bunch of other leftists in the U.S. before he ran off to Guyana.
As a matter of fact the entirety of Jonestown left all of their assets to the communist party of the Soviet Union after their “revolutionary suicide” (of which there were many deaths that were ruled as homicides).
It was only after the mass suicide did the “religious fanatic” lie started propagating because liberals didnt want their ideology anywhere near Jonestown.
I’m a bit disappointed in the author here.
The real issue is “criminal violence”, not hearing much about that, especially with obama emptying the federal prisons.
Oh this one is too EZ. Of course they’re FOS…
What we really need to counter this leftist bovine excrement is real statistics on recidivist killers.
My sense of it is that if you kept these gangsters in prison for the rest of their lives, you would have far fewer dead children in the inner cities.
I wonder if Politifact would be shocked at the number of “children” who voted in the last election, or the number of “children” who fought on our side in WWII? How about the number of states that allow “children” to get married without parental consent (49)?
But if we take away people’s guns there’s like no way they could possibly harm themselves or others. Killing deer is barbaric, so don’t even try to use that as an excuse. 🙂
Jim Jones was a San Francisco Bay icon and help deliver the urban black vote to many prominent politicians in California government during the seventies. He got so batshit crazy that they had to try and sever ties with him when it became apparent what kind of cult he was running. He pulled up stakes and left for greener pastures……….
Fake news.
Stats further muddied by the term ‘young adult’ as defined by the Obama healthcare system– “If a parent’s health insurance plan covers dependents, you usually can be added to their plan and stay on it until you turn 26. … You can stay on a parent’s plan until you turn 26.”
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