I am not sure how many of you have read the article that Time magazine published on June 20th of 2014, but if you haven’t, it’s all about pit bulls; the statistics of pit bull attacks, a few details about specific attacks and the collected opinions from PETA and DogBite.org.

An interesting article but slanted nonetheless. Let’s start at the top, beginning with the title: “The Problem with Pit Bulls”. The problem with pit bulls is that there is a lot of truth to the stereotype of the breed. They’re strong, stocky and built to defend themselves. They’re a utilitarian breed that was purposely built, so to speak. But the idea that every pit bull is dangerous is like saying every Muslim is a radical Muslim bent on wreaking havoc towards the United States. 100% of the planes flown into American buildings were flown by Muslims. Taken out of context, that statistic is scary.

Time magazine quotes The Daily Beast by stating that pit bulls lead the most dangerous breed list with 159 fatalities a year. The death toll in 2010 due to homicides according to the CDC was 31,672. Let’s take a second and examine this. A pit bull is an animal that doesn’t have the ability to reason, sit down and contemplate decisions. Arguably, it knows what its owner has taught them but it doesn’t have the innate sense of ‘right and wrong’ and if it does, it certainly isn’t the same as a humans. The ‘right and wrong’ is trained into it by its owner. Whether fighting is ‘right or wrong’, it all comes down to how they are raised, not how it is bred. Humans on the other hand, do have an innate sense of what is right and wrong. We know that killing or fighting someone else is wrong yet 31,672 were killed by other humans with guns in one year. The CDC reports that in 2010, 2,468,435 people died in the US alone. From this we figure .0001% of deaths a year are attributed to pit bull attacks vs .012% from guns. That’s 120x more deaths a year because of intentional human violence vs. provoked or otherwise unspecified pit bull attacks. In other words, we never truly find out why a pit bull attacks a human as you can’t put them on trial. We don’t know whether they were provoked or whether it was trained to attack, but we do know that humans intentionally went out of their way to get a gun and kill 120x more people.

By themselves, guns do not kill people. It takes human involvement. I would venture to say that without human involvement pit bulls might just be another breed of dog.

So the question is ‘why don’t we hold ourselves to the same standards as we do pit bulls? According to TIME and their 20 year old data that they collected from the CDC, : “A CDC report on dog-bite fatalities from 1978 to 1998 confirms that pit bulls are responsible for more deaths than any other breed, but the CDC no longer collects breed-specific information.” Nothing like accurate, up-to-date information. Hate to keep hammering this point home, but humans have always accounted for 100% of the gun related deaths and as I stated above with 4 year old data from the CDC vs. 20 year old data, humans still have killed 120x more humans than pit bulls and that doesn’t account for all the conflicts and wars in that 4 year span.

TIME goes on to say and quote Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of cruelty investigations, “PETA stands by breed-specific sterilization as a common-sense solution to what has become a human-safety issue. “These dogs were bred to bait bulls. They were bred to fight each other to the death,” she said. “Just because we’re an animal-rights organization doesn’t mean we’re not concerned about public safety.”

PETA is concerned about public safety as much as every politician is. As long as they can get your vote and support they will say just about anything. Might I add that in May of this year, PETA stated that cows milk causes autism. Spreading unsubstantiated information is PETA’s idea of ‘concerned about public safety’. So maybe take what PETA says with a grain of salt.

Oh wait, hey TIME, it’s cool that you included PETA in your article as a point of contention; ‘Hey everyone, look even PETA doesn’t like pit bulls and they like all animals so we must be unbiased”. TIME, did you forget about the article you wrote in April of last year about how PETA kills 90% of all animals brought to their shelters? How much does PETA really care about animals?

We as a human race are supposedly the most intelligent beings on the planet; as such we also have the responsibility to take care of the planet and the animals on it. However we continue to build bigger cities and increasing urban sprawl as a result and then we are surprised when wolves eat our cats or we find black bears in our backyards. So we go out and kill the wolves and the bears because they pose a threat. We kill deer because they are over populated and we train pit bulls to fight and then we kill pit bulls because they fight. Wolves don’t want to be in our backyard, but they have nowhere to go, pit bulls fight because that’s what they have been trained to do, not bred to do.

Instead of blaming the gun for homicides, wolves for loss of domestic property and pit bulls for fighting how about we look at the real problem, us.