Last week, an opinion column appeared in the San Jose Mercury News that just didn’t seem right to me. It was by a writer that I had never heard of, and referenced statistics that seemed to contradict some California gun violence statistics that I had read a couple of weeks earlier, in a story about the Half Moon Bay agriculture worker shootings.
Here is the opinion piece:
It seemed fishy to me, as the data referenced in the opinion piece was very specific, suspiciously specific, but I didn’t follow up on it.
However, a gentleman by the name of Eamonn Gormley was much more diligent than I, and wrote the following Letter to the Editor (I am copying here, but you can find it online here):
Dubious data clouds gun control debate
Amy Swearer pulls out the usual cherry-picked data, and the traditional Chicago fallacy, to repeat the “gun control doesn’t work” lie. By focusing only on mass shootings (conveniently redefined to produce a more congenial dataset), she triumphantly claims that California leads the nation in mass shootings. If you want to increase your freedom to get shot, move to Mississippi where the firearms mortality rate is 28.6 per 100,000 compared with 8.5 in California, which is seventh from the bottom of the table.
The best city to get shot in would be Jackson, Miss., where homicides per capita are 97.6. Chicago, which is next door to the gun shows of Indiana, ranks 26th at 25.
Gun control works. No amount of mental or statistical gymnastics from right-wing “think tanks” can challenge that reality.
— Eamonn Gormley, of San Jose
I particularly like the quotation marks around “think tanks”. Well done, Eamonn!
