Former President Bill Clinton recently released a “public service message” on the progressive ATTN: platform calling for a return to the 1994-2004 “assault weapons” ban which he signed into law. Clinton is introduced as the “Explainer in Chief,” but the entire 2:53 minute clip is generously seasoned with false equivalencies.
Of course, that isn’t surprising, given the standard gun control playbook. But, like his gun-controlling colleagues, Clinton’s message is directed at ill-informed people who will take what he says at face value. Let’s break down Clinton’s talk and add some much-needed context.
More children die from gunshot wounds than car wrecks. Supposedly.
That’s a statement that gun controllers have been shopping around for months now. The allegation is deliberately shocking. Seriously, who wouldn’t be alarmed by that? And Clinton doesn’t disappoint, leading off with it.
The numbers come from a letter published by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), citing a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The letter notes that the CDC found that, as of 2020, firearms are the leading cause of death among “children and adolescents.”
Unfortunately, both the CDC and the NEJM have bought into the flawed “public health” approach to firearms policy. This has led to some questionable methodology. Let’s clear things up a bit.
Data Clarification
First, what do you think of when you hear the phrase “children and adolescents?” 18 has long been the age of majority in the United States. But even 17-year-olds can join the military with parental consent. They are also commonly tried as adults in certain criminal cases. Yet 17, 18, and 19-year-olds are included in the CDC’s data.
Dr. John Lott runs the Crime Research Prevention Center and is the nation’s leading firearms statistics researcher. Lott has pointed out several flaws in the CDC’s data model, plus the fact that the CDC numbers don’t match up with the FBI’s crime statistics. I won’t bore you (or myself) with a statistical analysis, but here are some numbers for individuals aged 1 through 19 for 2020:
Firearms vs. Motor Vehicles in Context
- Total Firearm Deaths (CDC): 4,253
- Total Firearm Deaths (FBI): 3,405
- Firearm Homicides (CDC): 2,811
- Firearm Homicides (FBI): 1,963
- Accidental Firearm Deaths (Both): 149
- Firearm Suicides (Both): 1,293
These figures include justifiable homicides as defined by the FBI.
There is yet no explanation for the homicide discrepancy between the FBI and CDC reports. The FBI’s role seems to make them more reliable on those numbers, but you decide for yourself. When 18 and 19-year-olds are removed, the numbers drop dramatically to 1,376 firearm homicides (from 2,811) for the CDC and 963 firearm homicides (from 1,963) for the FBI. That’s more than a 50% reduction for both organizations.
Lott writes that the 17, 18, and 19-year-old numbers are heavily influenced by gang activity, further invalidating the CDC, and Bill Clinton’s, claim. Finally, using these numbers to justify an “assault weapons” ban is even more disingenuous since we know that gang violence involving guns is mostly perpetrated with handguns.
Plus, Lott shows that the rate of 75-80% of firearm injuries and deaths for people under age 20 regularly applies to those aged 17, 18, and 19. The inclusion of those ages is a deliberate, and common, ploy to influence the data.
Motor vehicle deaths in the same age group, 1 through 19, totaled 3,742, compared to 4,253 firearm deaths. But even that number is misleading. The CDC’s motor vehicle fatality figure does not include cars hitting pedestrians or bicycles. Is that a deliberate attempt to lower the numbers? Hard to say, but it certainly affects the argument.
Finally, Lott notes that the overwhelming majority of motor vehicle deaths are accidental, compared to 1.5% of firearm deaths. Likewise, over 2/3 of firearm deaths are suicides, compared to 0.5% of motor vehicle deaths. Plus, the percentage of accidental firearm deaths declined much faster than accidental motor vehicle deaths from 2000 to 2015. Interestingly, Lott shows that non-firearm suicides increased much more than firearm suicides over the same period.
There is literally no correlation between the two data sets. Not even apples and oranges. More like apples and screwdrivers. Clinton and other gun controllers citing the same data will not tell you any of this.
Crafting a Narrative
Clinton uses this information to tell us how the government addressed motor vehicle deaths over time. “In the 1920s.” he says, “60% of deaths from automobiles were children under the age of nine.” This is probably true. It’s also another obfuscation effort since 75-80% of firearm deaths under age 20 are 17-,18-, and 19-year-olds, as noted above. Gang activity accounts for most of those. Clinton is simply pushing a false equivalency.
“We learned from those tragedies,” Clinton continues, “and as cars changed, so did our laws. We made roads safer. We made cars smarter. We created laws to prevent drunk driving.” (Have they really prevented it?) “We made everybody take a driver’s test to get a driver’s license. And it worked.”
Here’s another tiresome gun controller tactic. They love to cite driver’s training and licenses to justify mandatory firearms training and licensing schemes. They choose to ignore the fact that driving is a privilege and owning a firearm is a Constitutionally protected right. The point is that they want people to think of firearms ownership as a privilege that can be regulated or even taken away. Standard propaganda.
Same Old Same Old
Clinton then rolls out the old saw about muskets versus modern firearms and how he “grew up in this culture,” meaning the American firearms culture. “Most of those people,” he says, meaning responsible gun owners, “would never do anything to endanger an innocent life.”
He is correct, at least, about that. He doesn’t explain why the laws he pushes would only impact those same people. But gun controllers never do. He tells us he used to own a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun. Congratulations, Bill. You and millions of other people. That doesn’t make you an expert on anything.
But the point of that is his saying that those same people “Have been terrified into thinking that if they agree to the most simple, straightforward, obvious, non-interfering mechanisms, somehow, it’s the beginning of a slippery slope that will rob them of their Second Amendment rights. It’s not true.”
Well, Bill, it is true. The actions of gun controllers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and even right here in the US, demonstrate that no amount of gun control will ever be enough for them. Their laws don’t work because they only apply to the law-abiding. When they are shown not to work, their answer is always more gun control. That is the literal definition of a slippery slope.
And I love the use of the word, “noninterfering.” As if banning the most popular rifle in America, the AR-15, and millions of other rifles in the same category, doesn’t interfere with Americans’ exercise of their rights. Pure gaslighting.
And since you imply that the Framers could not envision modern firearms, does that mean the First Amendment applies only to speech shouted from street corners, written with quill and ink on parchment, or printed using 18th-century presses? Of course not, because you are once again using a false equivalency.
The Cherry on Top
The whole thing builds, of course, for Clinton’s call to reinstate the 1994 “assault weapons” ban and 10-round magazine restriction. He notes that the law was supported by Democrats and some Republicans. He also says that former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, the latter two being Republicans, wrote a letter supporting the law.
He even shows a clip of Reagan saying that “I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon.” Of course, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with sports and AK-47s are not machine guns. But semantics, right? Yeah, right. And Reagan was not so pro-gun as many might think. It was he, as Governor of California, who first instituted gun control in the Golden State as a political ploy to disarm the Black Panthers. Never mind that they had not committed any crimes with their firearms. He also happily signed the 1986 Amendment to the Gun Control Act, known as the Brady Bill, into law.
Clinton claims that mass shootings went down after the ban and that it helped bring about a 25-year low in crime and a 33-year low in the murder rate. The only problem is that John Lott has demonstrated that those numbers were already trending down and had been for years. The mass shooting numbers stayed level, despite a growing population. The ban did not affect the trends’ trajectories. The trend was caused not by the ban, but by tougher sentencing and a general crackdown on crime across the board.
Congress allowed the ban to sunset because data showed it had no measurable impact on crime rates. The sunset clause required that data before the bill could expire. Clinton himself acknowledged that data. But he thinks we’ve forgotten that nugget. Sadly, most people aren’t aware of it to begin with.
Clinton also claims that mass shootings went back up after the ban expired in 2004. Again, Lott disproves this. The reality is that the media made a concerted effort to make us think they were going back up. They were aided by misinformation from groups like Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, which changed the definition of mass shooting to fit their narrative. The FBI excludes shootings “that resulted from gang or drug violence” or were part of other crimes. Everytown includes these to pump up the numbers. They deliberately mislead the public.
The “Assault Weapon” Myth
Lott also shows that rifles of all kinds, much less the scary “assault weapons” are only used in 12% of mass shootings, while handguns are used in 68%. So, why the focus on “assault weapons?” You likely know that as well as I do. It’s because they look scary to many people who don’t know what they’re looking at, easily demonized as “weapons of war,” and they have been used in several high-profile shootings.
But the fact remains that handguns account for far more deaths than these rifles. It’s all a public relations game. But never fear. You know that slippery slope that Clinton says doesn’t exist? When banning the scary rifles doesn’t do what the gun controllers’ say it will, they’ll target those evil handguns, exactly like Canada just did.
Don’t Fall for It
Bill Clinton, like Michael Bloomberg, is a committed gun controller. He doesn’t mind pushing his message using misinformation, incomplete “facts,” and false numbers. After all, he’s speaking to uninformed people who don’t know any better.
And he’s a former President. Why would he not speak the truth? If you were paying attention in the 1990s, you understand that question’s obvious irony. Arkansans didn’t call him “Slick Willie” for nothing. He’s apparently as slick as ever.
Much of the information for this commentary was taken from Dr. John Lott’s book, The War on Guns, and his website crimeresearch.org. I recommend both if you want to see the truth about gun control.
