Newsweek‘s Bogus Gun Rhetoric Misses an Amazing Find

Newsweek dropped a really ripe one today, full of misleading statistics and bogus rhetoric. But there’s a fascinating gem in the study itself that really needs to be highlighted. Let’s go through some screenshots of the Newsweek piece, to make sure they don’t go back and stealth-edit it later like Vox does, and then talk about that gem.

First off, we have an embed to a YouTube video about “America’s Gun Violence Epidemic.” I’m not even going to bother watching this, because we’ve already shown time and again that there is no gun violence epidemic in the United States. We are in the middle of a valley of the lowest homicide rate we’ve had in our history, outside a few years in the middle 1950s. Read about that here.

They did it again, did you see it? It seems like at least once per week a news outlet throws out a “39 thousand killed by guns” number without mentioning that two thirds of those are suicides and seven eighths of the suicides are men. They do this all the time, and then in the next sentence they pivot to talking about homicides, to fool the reader into thinking that that’s the homicide number. It’s not. Homicides are, annually speaking, about a third…