The NRA-ILA writes:

The Washington Post has surpassed the Brady Campaign and Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety to take a place alongside the New York Times as the premier anti-gun propagandists in the country. While those gun control groups have been known to pervert the facts to fit their agenda, a recent Post article and accompanying editorial go where even the most hardline gun control groups no longer tread.

On September 15, the Washington Post published an article with the sensationalist headline “Children under fire,” which carried the subtitle, “Almost two dozen kids are shot every day in the U.S. This 4-year-old was one of them.” In it, the author used the tragic shooting of a 4-year-old Cleveland boy as a jumping-off point to discuss the number “children” shot in the U.S. each day.

Throughout the article, the author referred to his subjects as “children,” contending, “On average, 23 children were shot each day in the United States in 2015.” Accompanied by extensive artwork of the boy and his injuries, the author’s obvious intent was to give the impression that such incidents involving young children are common.

Using a well-worn anti-gun tactic, the author came to the deceptive 23 “children” a day figures by combining the annual number of firearms-related injuries among those properly identified as children (0-14) with firearms-related injuries among juveniles (15-17) and labeling the entire group “children.” As one might expect, juveniles, rather than children, account for the vast majority of firearms-related injuries.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2015 there were 8,369 firearms injuries among those ages 0-17. Juveniles ages 15-17 accounted for 6,476, or 77 percent, of those injuries. Excluding these individuals from the measurement, the average number of children who sustained a firearm injury each day drops from 23 to 5.

Not content to let the article alone mislead the public, on September 18 the Post’s editorial board weighed in. The online version of the Post editorial carried the headline “Twenty-three children are shot every day in America,” just above a picture of the 4-year-old featured in the article. Once again, the Post’s intent was obvious; to portray young children as suffering gunshot wounds 23 times each day.

Such deceptive tactics place the Post at odds with even the institutional gun control lobby. After using this approach throughout the 1990s (sometimes using ages 0-19), the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) now refers to this age group as “children and teens” in their materials.

Everytown also uses the term “children and teens” to refer to those ages 0-19. Unlike the Post, Everytown grants some additional context to the statistic, admitting on its website, “Rates of firearm injury death increase rapidly after age 12.”

If this NRA-ILA Grassroots Alert article seems familiar, that is because there has been a recent resurgence in the use of the misleading method employed by the Post. While Americans’ trust in the media is already near a historic low, the Post’s use of a deceptive tactic that even the gun control lobby has abandoned should further inform readers as to the “quality” of journalism to expect from the publication.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

25 COMMENTS

  1. If there’s one thing I learned in statistics class it was to declare your findings first then manipulate the data however was required to support those findings.

    Or was that in journalism class? Maybe meteorology? Sociology? Can’t remember. Probably all of them.

  2. If gun-control groups including the Washington Times didn’t lie, they would have almost nothing to say at all.

    • The Washington Times is the Conservative paper in D.C. This article refers to the Liberal propaganda rag Washington Post.

      • One thing that *must* be understood about the Washington Post as a newspaper is how it CAN AFFORD to be as blatantly Leftist as it wants to be with near ZERO negative repercussions.

        The owner can *literally* dump *mountains* of money into it with near-impunity:

        “How Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reinvented The Washington Post, the 140-year-old newspaper he bought for $250 million”

        http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-washington-post-changed-after-jeff-bezos-acquisition-2016-5

        It’s dangerous to not treat the Washington Post like the venomous rattlesnake it is to conservative freedoms.

        (As a geek side-note – Bezos also owns ‘Blue Origin’, the rocket company who aims to give Elon Musk’s ‘SpaceX’ a run for it’s money in domination of orbital transport technology, along with Amazon.com, the 900 million lb.Gorilla of on-line sales…)

  3. Dormant, would be more apt in describing worn out phrases that gun control inc, has decided to set down for the moment, but they can and will pick it up any time they feel they can manipulate and confuse the uninitiated into supporting their propaganda.

    The entire stench of gun-control marches on in restrictive states like Cali, NY, etc…, but EVERY parent who owns a firearm that takes it for granted, and who causes death and harm from their negligent storage and securing of their firearm becomes a lodestone of anti-gun media coverage, like flies buzzing around carrion, always looking to exploit dead children for their political hustle. It’s sickening, but it’s the way things are, every adult who merely “possesses” a firearm is extra special double secret probation guilty when improperly securing and storing the firearm in their possession. This group provides so much of the inflated statistics that gun-control inc loves to trot out like a pampered racing horse, to flash and dazzle the larger media with it’s ringing sound of truth.

    So we should expect more and more ad nauseum.

    • becomes a lodestone of anti-gun media coverage, . . . always looking to exploit dead children for their political hustle. It’s sickening, but it’s the way things are . . .”

      This is what we PotG all need to take to heart. We need to take care with our rhetoric so as not to provide the media with better quotes than they might make-up themselves. Tragically, too many gun owners have a knee-jerk defensive reaction. What is the consequence?

      One child killed in a gun accident is one too many. Yet, we are a country of 320,000,000 people – so, there will always be one; many in fact. Whose job is it to figure-out how to minimize the number? Whose job is it to apply the solutions?

      The media and gun controllers have just one answer to this question: ‘More government control’. Is that what we want? Do we PotG believe that’s the best our solution?

      If we gun-owners and users refuse to step-up-to-the-plate and undertake responsibility for figuring out the solutions and applying them, then we have no one to blame if Government does it for us.

      We PotG achieved a consensus on the “4 rules”. We have not done so on the practice of “purse carry”. I’m not here to say that “I know” what best-practice is on purse carry. I don’t know. I suspect that male gun owners can’t take the lead here; we must ask our lady gun-owners to find the solutions. Yet, we can all insist that this is a priority for our PotG community.

  4. Facts in context are not the leftist/ statists friend. So if they remove context we are left with only the emotional impact.

  5. Ditto…Shire-man. I was taught the same thing. Also to manipulate the phrasing of the questions to get the desired response. All surveys are designed this way so whoever is paying for it gets the numbers they want. In this way they can justify(sic) their stated position on any subject.

  6. Ah the anti Freedom and Liberty Left aka the Commiecrats and their propaganda wing are not beyond waving the bloody diapers,after all it’s for the children.

  7. Don’t see any kids in that picture, just products of the liberal dem plantation system on the way to an early grave, but no children.

  10. I live in WaPo country (N. Virginia), and I can assure you that they don’t call it Pravda-on-the-Potomac for nothing. I troll the Post (got to know what the enemy is up to), and I’ve come to the conclusion that no lie is too low for them to use to advance WaPo’s liberal-progressive-Marxist agenda. Except for the sports, all WaPo articles have an overarching socialist slant. It’s difficult to believe that when it was founded, the Post was a conservative newspaper for which John Philip Sousa wrote a march. That patriot would now spurn the Post and what it has become.

  11. I would really and truly like to know just how many of these gun control loons have ever handled a gun or shot a gun let alone owned one for ANY purpose?? Their lies are only surpassed by their ignorance. A gun is an inanimate object that requires human interaction. These loons have also failed to study/learn history about why our founders thought it essential that the citizens be armed but also how every tyrant in history since guns became available to the populace first took away every privately owned gun and outlawed ownership of any gun. Wonder why the tyrants would do that??? Maybe they were afraid that there could be an armed uprising? The English outlawed gun ownership in Scotland during the 1700’s. The first shots fired in the American Revolution were initiated when British troops were heading toward a reported arms cache in order to seize so the colonists couldn’t use it. Wonder why that was? After what Obama has done in elevating the tyranny of the Federal Government gun sales sky rocketed. Wonder why that was?? These looks ignore all of this and it is only those from the Democrat party who have gone all in for radical socialism that want desperately to disarm us!! Wonder why that is?

    • “These looks ignore all of this and it is only those from the Democrat party who have gone all in for radical socialism that want desperately to disarm us!! Wonder why that is?”

      You really need to ask that question?

      They are Leftist scum that want you to bow to them…

  15. It’s “claim chicken” — What’s the most outrageous claim, that you can’t prove I’m absolutely wrong. Hay, there’s some number of people killed by gunshot, among them at least one actual child, so … For the Children!

    With “claim chicken”, bigger is better; the burden of proof is on who hears it, not who makes it; the standard isn’t say only what’s entirely right, but say anything that can’t be proven wrong, completely & unequivocally.

    If you’re trying to give people information for use, a claim that can be misunderstood is worthless. These people are creating entertainment, propaganda, or entertaining propaganda useful only to get people wee-wee’d up long enough for a riot or a vote.

    Most of the people putting this kind of stuff out don’t know they are doing it. Since they’re just response-bleats it’s easy, so they do a lot of it. It’s also an opportunity. If you can engage someone who thinks at all, even occasionally, questions will hook them. They never thought about what it means.

    By flooding the non-conversation with this style of “discourse” especially around “politics”, these people didn’t just *create* Trump-in-the-White-House. They’re more or less guaranteeing 2-terms for The Orange Crush. And they can’t stand him: that he exists, that he’s where he is, every single thing about him.

    Yet, they can’t shut up. They did it to themselves, and can’t stop. Me, I can’t stop laughing.

  16. Well the anti-gunners’ “claim” will hold water – barely – if one accepts those from ages one to 21 ( or perhaps greater ) are ” children” ! The FBI UCR used to tabulate these statistics in spreadsheet format enabling a researcher to easily tabulate reported numbers of criminal injury and/or fatalities by cause for any given age bracket, race, or ethnicity . Then the Obama Administration struck, and this formerly transparent source was wrested into a complex and convoluted compilation of data sets requiring high-powered algorithms to interpret.

  17. There is no hope for people stupid enuff to listen to such crazy propaganda vomit from butt hurt losers….do they not realize they will never take our guns??????Never!

    Not even if hell freezes over 10 trillion times we will always be armed……as god intended….

Comments are closed.