Barack Obama refuses to give up the spotlight.
Following with etiquette, Obama said he would recede into the shadows so Donald Trump could govern how he saw fit, but that didn’t last long.
Obama is back yet again to influence policy, and once again he’s doing it with falsehoods.
The compliant, left-leaning mainstream media allowed the Obama administration to flout the rule of law at every turn, and didn’t bother to call him out when he said his presidency was free from scandal.
Never mind the “fast and furious” debacle that led to his Attorney General being held in contempt of congress, or the Lois Lerner IRS scandal where conservative groups were targeted, or Iranian terrorist activity being downplayed to ram through the dangerous Iran nuclear deal, or the Obamacare “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” lie—just to name a few.
Now Obama is perpetuating a lie about school shootings to push gun control legislation he was unable to pass during his two terms.
From BizPacReview:
As Mark Twain once quipped, there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Whether or not former President Obama, a one-time University of Chicago lecturer who graduated from Harvard Law school, is aware of the falsity of certain shooting statistics flying around in this charged political atmosphere, it would behoove him to stop spreading lies.
The origin of these lies, namely the infamous “18 school shootings in 2018” statistic, is Everytown for Gun Safety, an activist gun control group that is interested in ‘action’ first and facts second.
At a keynote address to a physician’s conference known as CRT 2018 near the White House, the former president referenced the misleading statistic.
“If you ask me the thing that broke my heart, particularly when now I see there have been, and I’ve gotta update this, […] 18 shootings in schools this year… this year!” Obama said, as reported by the Washington Examiner. “And for the medical community, you see the statistics. The leading causes of death among young people in this country have all but, [car] traffic starts going down and stabilizing, gun-inflicted fatalities where you combine suicide and gun violence, it just keeps rising.”
Indeed, one must combine the firearms suicide rates and homicide rates in order to see an increase in gun deaths. As Mother Jones, which has assiduously collected such statistics, illustrates in one chart:
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Former President Obama does need to update his statistics and replace them with the correct ones. Several analyses have falsified the ’18 school shootings’ statistic, which was certainly inflated deliberately by Everytown in order to push its activist agenda.
In addition to the Washington Examiner, The Washington Post has also debunked the number. The publication aptly captures the background:
“The stunning number swept across the Internet within minutes of the news Wednesday that, yet again, another young man with another semiautomatic rifle had rampaged through a school, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in South Florida.
The figure originated with Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group, co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, that works to prevent gun violence and is most famous for its running tally of school shootings.
‘This,’ the organization tweeted at 4:22 p.m. Wednesday,‘is the 18th school shooting in the U.S. in 2018.’
Then the Post proceeds to expose the statistic as false:
“It is a horrifying statistic. And it is wrong.
Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counted as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.”
The Washington Post explains the root problem with Everytown’s statistics: They do not define what people think they define.
Everytown explains on its website that it defines a school shooting as “any time a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds.”
The lie about 18 school shootings is nothing but fear-mongering to ply people into giving up their rights.
This is a tactic the left has been using for decades. As former Obama Chief Of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”