By Dave Workman
OPINION: This Friday, June 6, will be the 11th annual National Gun Violence Awareness Day, ironically on the 81st anniversary of D-Day, when a significantly violent allied invasion at Normandy paved the way for the liberation of Europe and an end to Nazi tyranny.
There was lots of “gun violence” that day on the Normandy beachhead, but virtually the entire free world seemed pleased, while those wearing German uniforms were much less enthusiastic.
Promoters of “Gun Violence Awareness Day” will be crowding around every television camera and microphone to push for excessive new restrictions on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. High on their list of arguments will no doubt be references to saving the children, and how guns are the “leading cause of death” –and see how they invariably couch this—“for children and teens.”
Technically correct, but factually deceiving, as explained June 3 by syndicated opinion columnist David Mastio for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star. In a 1,132-word short essay, Mastio—who has more than three decades of experience writing for such publications as USA TODAY, the Washington Times, Virginian-Pilot, Washington Examiner and Detroit News—lowered the proverbial boom on what has become a favorite argument for more gun control.
“Facts trigger truth,” Mastio writes. “The facts tell a different story. Guns are not the number one killer of children at any age between 0 and 12. They never have been. Cars are the biggest killer. Who says? The CDC database called WONDER that tracks the cause of death in most U.S. deaths indexed by race, sex and age among other characteristics.”
In fleshing out this puzzle, Mastio says he asked a Kansas City anti-gun activist about the claim he received from her declaring “Gun deaths are the number one cause of deaths of American children and adolescents.” When he pressed her about why she was spreading a lie about childhood deaths, she didn’t respond. Instead, he was contacted by someone from anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, who cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which lumps together “dead children and teens” ranging to ages 18 and 19—which Mastio properly describes as “adult teens”—and essentially gets away with it.
It is virtually the same strategy used for years by gun prohibitionists who lump together all firearms-related deaths including homicide, suicide and accidental/negligent, and call them all “victims of gun violence.” It is how they’ve managed to make the claim with a straight face.
Writing about gun-related deaths becomes tricky primarily because the user-unfriendly FBI “Crime Data Explorer” and even the CDC emphasize percentages when actual counts are what would be more easily understood by the general public, and far less easy to manipulate and misrepresent.
And Pew Research came through with a look at firearms fatalities in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available. Here’s what Pew says, in plain language:
“In 2023, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 46,728 people died from gun-related injuries, according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths the CDC tracks: those that involved law enforcement, those that were accidental, and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information from official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)
“Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths,” Pew added. “In 2023, 58% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (27,300), while 38% were murders (17,927). The remaining gun deaths that year involved law enforcement (604), were accidental (463) or had undetermined circumstances (434), according to CDC data.”
That was much easier to understand, and it blows holes in the “gun violence deaths” mix, which had portrayed every death as though it were a homicide, and way too many people were fooled.
Murder is a crime, while suicide is an act of emotional desperation, better addressed with quality mental health counseling and intervention than it could ever be by passing new gun restrictions.
The term “gun violence” is itself misleading. No other murderous act—whether it involved a blunt instrument, knife/cutting instrument, fists or feet, or other non-firearm weapons—is similarly nicknamed. One never reads about “knife violence” or “hammer violence.” Yet in any given year, more people are fatally stabbed/slashed than are killed with rifles of any kind, including modern semiautomatic rifles. In any given year, as illustrated by the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2019—the final year the agency made its annual crime report with a user-friendly format—more people were also killed with “personal weapons” (hands, feet, fists) than rifles or shotguns of any kind. Still, nobody refers to such murders as “fist violence” or “feet violence.”
Like so many other phrases in the gun control lexicon, the term “gun violence” was all-too-quickly embraced by the establishment media. It got so bad that in July 2022, the Associated Press advised journalists in its updated Stylebook to avoid using the terms “assault weapon” or “assault rifle” because the terms are “highly politicized.”
That lasted for two years. In May 2024, the AP backpedaled, stating in its 57th Stylebook edition, “the terms assault weapon or assault weapons may be used in headlines and on first reference in stories. Previous guidance advised avoiding the terms, but now limited use is allowed with specifics included whenever possible.”
While the debate between gun prohibitionists and Second Amendment advocates will continue perhaps the tale is best told with other statistics, from the Crime Prevention Research Center.
“After a spike in 2022,” the CPRC reported last December, “the number of Concealed Carry Permit holders across the United States fell for a second consecutive year. The figure now stands at 21.46 million – a 1.8% drop since last year. A major cause of the continuous decline is that 29 states now have Constitutional Carry laws after Louisiana allowing permitless carry, effective July 4, 2024. In other words, 46.8% of Americans (157.6 million) now live in Constitutional Carry States, with 67.7% of the land in the country (2.57 million square miles).”
Breaking it down, the center also reported:
■ 8.2% of American adults have permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 9.8% of adults have a permit.
■ In sixteen states, more than 10% of adults have permits. Oregon has fallen slightly below 10% this year. Indiana has the highest concealed carry rate — 23.1%. Alabama is second with 20.5%, and Colorado is third with 17.7%.
■ Five states now have over 1 million permit holders: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Florida is the top states with 2.46 million permits. Alabama has fallen below 1 million permit holders this year, but it has become a Constitutional Carry state since January 1, 2023, meaning that people no longer need a permit to carry.
Washington state just reported a spike of more than 7,000 concealed pistol licenses added over the past two months, according to AmmoLand News.
And the National Shooting Sports Foundation reported in January that “approximately 26.2 million law-abiding Americans, from all different races, genders, backgrounds, religions and ethnicities, went to their local firearm retailer and bought a gun for the first time between 2020 and today.”
What does this tell us? Americans are concerned about gun-related violence, and millions of law-abiding citizens have taken steps to defend themselves against it. And all of those people may vigorously defend their constitutionally-enumerated right to own guns, and they may be far less likely henceforth to be misled by the gun control crowd.
Workman is editor-in-chief at TheGunMag.com.
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