The tragedy in Las Vegas has transformed everyone on the left into a gun expert.
Demonization of gun owners and entreaties for gun confiscation abound.
It’s bad enough when late-nite hosts do it, but now NFL head coaches are getting in on the left-wing action.
New Orleans Saints’ head coach Sean Payton made a childish tweet about gun deaths that displayed his utter lack of knowledge on the subject.
From Breitbart:
Ever since the tragic shooting in Las Vegas Sunday night, legions of celebrities who have very little knowledge of guns, criminal psychology, mental disorders, or any helpful information have taken to Twitter or gone on television to offer their “solutions” to the problem of mass shootings in America.
The latest such incident of ill-informed advice, in the sports world, comes from New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton.
On Tuesday, Payton responded to the heinous Las Vegas attack by tweeting claims that, since 1968, more Americans have been killed by guns than have been killed on all battlefields throughout the whole of the American experience.
Payton tweeted:
Sean Payton on Twitter
Crazy statistic!! It’s time. #CommonSense
Note how he followed the claim with the hashtag “common sense.” Ironically, if we look at this death claim comparison via common sense we quickly see it is a façade.
For example, the number of Americans killed on the Civil War battlefield alone was approximately 620,000 and the number killed in World II was 418,000. From those two wars alone we are already at 1,038,000. Add the approximate 115,000 from WWI, the 35,000 from Korea, and the 58,000 from Vietnam and we are at 1,246,000 without even considering the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others.
And it is important to remember is the military deaths are combat deaths. If we add in non-combat related military deaths the numbers would surge. Yet the figures Payton tweeted for gun deaths are not limited to gun crime–i.e., gun homicides. Instead, they include firearms-related suicides as well. The source for Payton’s tweet is the New York Times and the NYT’s inclusion of suicides allows them to swell gun death figures by 63 to 66 percent.
Politifact discovered this when they reviewed the NYT piece, then reported:
These figures refer to all gunfire-related deaths, not just homicides. In fact, homicides represent a minority of gun deaths, with suicides comprising the biggest share. In 2013, according to CDC data, 63 percent of gun-related deaths were from suicides, 33 percent were from homicides, and roughly 1 percent each were from accidents, legal interventions and undetermined causes.
The bottom line, the claims that Payton calls “Crazy statistic!!” epitomize the bad habit of comparing apples to oranges. The gun numbers are overblown by 63-66 percent and that gives the false impression that American society is more dangerous than the battlefield.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
The left loves to conveniently leave out the fact they’re conflating gun homicides and gun suicides in their gun death calculations, as if someone ending his own life with a razor blade is more acceptable.
Mass shootings are a tragedy, but the gun control laws the left is advocating for won’t stop them.
In the case of the Las Vegas shooter, he passed a background check and purchased the weapons legally.
Even if all guns were banned, a black market would exist (it already does), just as it does with drugs. It should also be noted that the shooter was allegedly worth $2 million, so purchasing an illegal firearm wouldn’t have been terribly difficult.
Perhaps Sean Payton should exhibit more common sense before making reductive tweets that don’t add to the discussion.