Mike “the Gun Guy” Weisser is a veritable font of anti-firearms freedom fail. TTAG has fisked The Huffington Post’s pet Fudd some 24 times. And counting. ‘Cause MTTG is still at it.

Mr. Weisser’s latest attempt at anti-gun agitprop is aimed squarely at America’s oldest civil rights organization: NRA Once Again Tries To Discredit Doctors With Alt-Right Nonsense. And it goes a little something like this:

One of these days, public health researchers will stop getting all hot and bothered about gun injuries and turn their attention to serious threats to health, like fatalities from dog bites (20-30 per year,) or deaths from bee stings (upwards of 100 per year,) or worst of all, getting strangled by a Python – it happened to a guy in 2006.  It really did.

But gun injuries, particularly injuries to kids? Give me a break. Everyone knows that guns don’t hurt people. People hurt people. And this isn’t just a scientific fact. You can also find this evidence in Biblical texts. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at this survey conducted by the American Culture and Faith Institute conducted in 2012.

I guess the number of children killed in car accidents (over 1600 children per year under 15) or drown in pools (some 3.5k children per year under 14) aren’t a suitable statistic for comparison.

Here’s the weird thing: MTTG’s polemic doesn’t cite the actual number of children killed by gunfire per year.

The five-year-old Mt. Sinai Hospital study to which Mr. Weisser [eventually] links reports that there were 5,862 pediatric firearm-related hospitalizations in that year. It doesn’t reveal how many were fatal.

The Mt. Sinai study includes all “children” under 20-years-old — even though, legally speaking, a “child” is under 18. The study lists firearms injuries by “assaults, unintentional, suicides or undetermined,” breaking down those categories by age:

Note the huge jump in the number of incidents — more than a triple — from the 10 – 14 age group to the 15 – 19 age group.

Also notice that “Assault” accounts for the lion’s share of firearms-related injuries, even when considering all age groups.

No question: New York City’s “children” aged 15 – 19 years old face a different type of firearms-related danger than children below that age — most likely due to criminal activity by the 15 – 19-year-old “children” themselves. You know…gang-banging.

This is why the NRA disses surveys that simply calculate the total number of “children” killed by “gun violence.” A distinction that annoys Mr. Weisser to the point of literary apoplexy.

.  . . back to the pediatricians from Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City who discovered again what we already know, namely, that if you put a loaded gun in the hands of a kid, someone’s going to get badly hurt.

And what I love most of all about how the NRA responded to this remarkable state of medical affairs was their comment that the study is entirely bogus because anyone who knows anything about medicine knows that kids above the age of fifteen aren’t kids.

That’s right – the Mt. Sinai research covered everyone between the ages of zero to nineteen who was admitted to a hospital with an unintentional gun wound, and since more than 80 percent of the patients were between 16 and 19, this proves that guns aren’t dangerous at all to the younger set.

Of course that’s not what it proves at all. Not to the NRA or anyone else. Everyone knows guns can be dangerous, period. One reason why the NRA leads the country in firearms education.

Again, the NRA objects to studies that lump in disparate data sets because they’re misleading. They’re used by Mr. Weisser and his ilk to wave the bloody shirt for gun control — despite the lack of evidence that gun control would reduce any of these incidents.

Let me say it as bluntly as I can: the attempt by the NRA to discredit medical concerns about gun violence is completely and totally a crock of you know what. First, pediatric practice always covers patients up to age 18, some practices go several years higher, but none go below. Second and more important, denying that guns hurt people panders to the same, alt-right stupidity which denies global warming or claims that Sandy Hook was a hoax.

Unless Mr. Weisser didn’t read the survey (what are the odds?), he knows that it includes patients up to 19-years-old. Why would he shave a year off the data set if not to make his “argument” more palatable?

By the same token…straw man. No one is saying guns don’t hurt people. If they didn’t they’d serve no useful purpose.

And while we’re at it, the NRA is neither a climate change denier nor a Sandy Hook hoaxer. Mr. Weisser’s mentions these two entirely unrelated issues solely to play to his sympathetic HuffPo audience and cast aspersions on the NRA and all those who oppose gun control. The point is to make them sound like “alt-right” lunatics.

And that’s what really galls me about Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser: he uses misinformation, misdirection and ad hominem attacks to smear and dehumanize gun owners. Avoiding any mention of Godwin’s Law (oops!), Mr. Weisser should know better. Thank God some of us do.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

63 COMMENTS

  1. This FLAME DELETED needs to shut up. “Look at me, I am a “reasonable gun owner” who works with people who hate and want to disarm me, look what a wonderful person I am”

    • So… about on par with lightning strikes. Maybe Mike should get over himself. Like protecting my child from house chemicals, the swimming pool, the staircase, and the kitchen knives and utensils, it is also my responsibility to protect them from guns if they are not yet educated in their safe use. Don’t need authoritarian (Republicans or Democrats) laws, telling me how to raise my kids or the risks of living life.

      • OK, I want to agree with you on this one. There shouldn’t be legislation telling you how to keep your kids safe. But what about the punitive aspect if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do? I don’t want to step on someone while they’re down, but what if you leave a loaded gun lying around and your kid (or mine or someone else’s) dies as a result? Grief aside, you, as the lawful owner of that firearm, are responsible for that life lost. And I think you should be punished.

        The problem with the liberals and their preventative laws are that preventative laws are largely inneffective. We all know this. Which is why laws should be punative. Punish people for doing wrong, not for what they might do wrong. The intent of the law should purely be to define what is illegal and what will happen to you if you break that law. And by establishing (and actually enforcing) the punitive aspect, we also get the added benefit of prevention. It’s a feature.

        Laws requiring specific safes or cable locks or 12 pound trigger pulls are nothing more than feel-good security theater designed to make gun ownership more difficult. But a law that states failure to properly secure a weapon in the presence of children that leads to injury or death will result in felony child endangerment or manslaughter charges – now we’re getting somewhere.

        I know how to secure my guns. You know how to secure your guns. We don’t need the government telling us how to secure our guns. But if we know how and we still fail to do it? That’s a problem. For me, the fear of something happening to one of my children or their friends is enough for successful prevention. For others, maybe it would be the fear of prison time. Whatever works. After all, it’s for the children!

        • What if you don’t secure your drain cleaner and your or my kid gets in the sink cabinet and drinks it? Or what if the child grabs kitchen knife from your unsecured drawer and falls on it? Different tool, same result – dead kid. Punishment for you, sir, no matter how devastated you might be!

  2. I like how the liberals went full on “if it doesn’t agree with us it’s alt right”

      • Right don’t need an in-hyphenated modifier. Right is Right is Right.

        The left on the other hand can be modified all to hell in order to keep track of all the ‘layers’, if you like statistics. Otherwise the Left can be lumped into the group Alt satan.

        Don’t buy into B.S. tags from the left.

    • My thought exactly. I rather doubt that any child 0-4 even knows what suicide is, or intended to take his or her own life.
      The look at the figures for “unintentional” deaths or injuries. It seems the results are pretty good up until age 15, and then they skyrocket. that doesn’t seem to make sense. Any possibility that many of these “unintentionals” are actually suicides?

    • It’s probably just referring to fatal self-inflicted gunshot wounds, ignoring the fact that the “voluntary and intentionally” part of the definition of suicide refers not just to the act, but the consequences as well.

      A child that young may voluntarily and intentionally pull the trigger, but not with the intent to kill themselves.

    • You caught that too, hunh? At first I did a double-take, then shook my head to clear it and make sure I was reading it correctly. It’s good to see that I wasn’t the only one who thought that was just a tad odd.

  5. I’d like to see more demographic details on these children who were either killed or wounded by guns. Do they appear disproportionately in any particular cross-sections?

    Suppose they occurred disproportionately among the children of: hunters; target shooters; CWP holders; criminals and their friends/family; non-gun owners where the children came upon guns by coincidence.

    If hunters’ children were disproportionately victims then we would know that our task is to educate hunters about gun-safety for children. If among non-gun owners, then – ironically – it would be those parents who are most in need of gun-safety education.

    What if the disproportionately-affected group were children of criminals and their friends/family? If that is what the data would show then we would need to concentrate on: enforcing felon-in-possession; and, gun-safety for non-gun owning friends/family.

    Why don’t we have these demographic cross-sections? Could it be because the data would show that which the data-holders want to keep under wraps?

  6. If one category under the Mt. Sinai study is “Unintentional” and another is “Suicide,” it seems they are categorizing “Suicide” as an *intentional* taking of one’s own life. If that’s it, then the number of 0-4 year-olds intentionally killing themselves with guns (23) is preposterous. Kids that age can’t conceptualize something like suicide, let alone write the note.

      • That sh_t is falling from their mouths. That doesn’t mean they are ‘telling us’. That would imply you waste too much time listening to them.

      • Newly identified contagious disease: “Hearing AIDS”.

        It’s what you get when you spend to much time listening to opinions from assholes.

        • My god, I can’t stop laughing at how priceless this is, I’d hug you if it wasn’t weird as all hell to hug a stranger without asking permission successfully.

  7. Where do they keep this guy and how has he managed to be ‘the face of the gun community’?

    I love the fact that without fail, the left manipulate statistics in order to dupe the easily outraged, madness….

  8. Personally, I believe that kids are safer around guns then they would be around Mike Weisser.

    Just sayin’.

  9. Isn’t it MTGG instead of MTTG? Or can we substitute SOB instead for a more accurate description?

    • ATTN Robert:
      As “The Brig” says:
      Could you edit your post to use the “MTGG” acronym instead of “MTTG?”

      As it is, it makes the POTG look a bit illiterate.

  10. Of course guns are safe for children…. who are either responsible, or responsibly supervised. You think I’m not gonna take my daughters shooting for 18 years? What a douchebag.

    • I believe it was a self appointed “appeal to authority” title…

      We need to meme it up with something more appropriate, like Mike “Sure guy, I’ll have the large fry” Weisser.

      • Throw in a British accent and you can do an Austin Power’s Mike the “Guns ain’t my bag baby” guy.

    • Nobody said “Don’t call yourself that”
      Kinda like when they name a law the affordable care act. Or safe act.

    • He owned a gun store in Massachusetts (or someplace like that) and theoretically owns one now, although the photos of him at his “store” look very artificial. And as others have said, he gave himself that moniker to curry favor with the progressive master race. He’s the very definition of a quisling.

      • He owned the Ware Gun Shop in central Massachusetts, which at one time bragged or was rumored to sell more firearms than any other store in the state. Was there roughly 10 years ago, place was empty, the 1 younger employee treated me and my buddy like shit.

    • I always assumed he got the nickname from writing for HuffPo and (apparently) owning guns. Kind of a “Hey he agrees with us and owns guns…he’s a gun guy!” kind of justification. Except he’s not a gun guy. In fact, from other first and second-hand info floating around the web, he is a borderline petty criminal and scam artist. He also likes to throw around that he has some sort of PhD in economics or something. Kind of like in the days of yore, people would buy “Dr.” Whatever’s Snake Oil. That’s what Mike Weasel is.

  12. So, Mike the Antigun Guy intentionally conflates “children”, “minors”, “pediatrics”, and “teens” in order to employ an appeal-to-emotion logical fallacy about the danger of firearms to children, and lectures the NRA et al for rightly discrediting a survey that lumps gang-banger teenagers in with “children”?

    For the record: a child is someone who has not yet reached puberty, which in most states is considered to be someone under the age of 14. So, no: 15-18 year olds are not children; they are minors.

    As for “medical concerns” about harm caused by guns: physicians, heal yourselves. The medical industry needs to tend to its own house, first – seeing as how it causes three or four orders of magnitude more accidental deaths than guns.

    • “Academy of Pediatrics recommends people be under pediatric care up to the age of 21”

      OMG that is hilarious. Funny this guy I knew back in high school was 19 years old when he caught fragments from an Iraqi grenade in his legs back in the 1st Gulf War. The Army didn’t send him to a pediatrician.

  14. Keep your friends close and your enemies . . . in a duffle bag in the trunk of your neighbors broke down car in their back yard under a tarp.

    It’s good to know what the opposition is ‘up-to’ but why does HUFFPOO and JIGGLYPOOF get so much play here?

  15. Ehhhh….he’s preaching to the choir at the Puffington Host. He’s not convincing anybody, but the already convinced. He’s got zero credibility outside of that bubble…Hell, Jordan Klepper and Katie Couric both skipped over his slim frame in their little hoplophobic tirades.

  16. MikeTheGunGuy is being fronted by somebody. Shortly after he lost his FFL(he still operates the Ware Gun shop) he founded the National Medical Council on Gun violence and hosts an annual meeting on ‘gun safety’. I don’t know where a failed businessman gets that kind of clout, but his Advisory Board is a who’s who of gun control advocates. I suspect he’s on Bloomberg’s payroll since MDA or any of the other Usual Suspects aren’t flush with cash.

    • If Bloomy is blowing is cash on this tool, I’m all for it…this clown is about as interesting and engaging as a tape worm.

  17. Does anyone know where I can get my S & W 686 painted like the ones in the photo? Ain’t nuthin’ says “‘Murica!” like that thar.

  19. “Alt Right” is a “bad” thing, since when?

  20. Huffington Post no longer has a comment section, and replaced it with a “make a correction” button (in case they misspell your preferred gender pronoun). I imagine this change came about because different opinions give snowflakes nose bleeds.

  21. Why didn’t he mention the 300 kids under 5 that drown in swimming pools every year? Or the number of child poisonings?

  24. “First, pediatric practice always covers patients up to age 18,”

    What a crock. How many of you went to a pediatrician when you were 16+?

    • I did. His rates were good and he was familiar with my medical history. As long as I got good doctoring I didn’t care whether there were toys in the lobby or not.

    • Pediatricians often specialize in age groups, usually 0-4, 4-10, and 10 – ‘aren’t you a little old for a pediatrician?’. Of the several I know, none will take a new patient over 14, and at least one ages patients out of the practice at 16. Absolutely none would see anyone 19 or older because it’s not even appropriate anymore, those patients belong in family practice. When talking about disease and age, it’s important.
      Violence isn’t an age thing in this sense, and it’s not a disease. Confusing the effects of criminality on older teens and young adults with accidents among those aged less than 5 years tells us absolutely nothing about the causes or solutions. In fact, what is the point of this ‘study’?

      Imagine a study conflating vehicular deaths of 0-4 year olds with those of 16-18 year olds. Would the causes stay the same? Would the contributing factors? Would solutions that work for one group have any bearing on the other?

      Will they next recomend safety seats for teenagers and distracted driving campaigns for pre-schoolers? That is the absurdity presented here. Both types of injuries have the same proximate cause, auto accident or GSW. Both occur across the age groups studied, toddlers and older teens, but they do not have the same medial or distal causes, since preschoolers don’t drive, or gangbang, while older teens do both.

      To make this even more painfully obvious, look at drug overdose: in a sub 5 year old, you want to know who in the child’s environment possesses the substance in question, in a 15 plus year old, you want to know who they hang out with, because though both are ‘children’ and both OD’d, the mechanism is going to be different. Conflating the two only muddies understanding, and is pointless, unless you’re pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with child safety.

  26. Keep everyone safe have mandatory gun safety training in the schools refreshed yearly! Even with that you cannot control stupid, Murphy, and lack of smarts between the ears!

  27. First off, medical errors resulting in patient death can be caused by nurses, midwives, technicians, physician assistants and podiatrists
    None of whom are doctors
    I strongly disagree with commenter Cjstl regarding unlocked guns in the home
    I have 3 children aged 10, 16, and 18
    All of them know never to handle a gun, knife or power tool without adult supervision
    They are well aware that consequences far worse than death would result if they broke that rule!
    I kept my home defense gun on my person until they were old enough to understand this
    Now loaded guns are kept out of sight downstairs and upstairs and the kids know where they are and how to use them
    They are only locked in the safe when guests come over
    Why should I be forced to follow a law requiring loaded guns be secured?

Comments are closed.