A study published this week by the Kaiser Foundation says that 1 in 5 people in the US has a family member who has died after being shot. This is a survey pretending to be science. Let’s do the math. I will even be kind and use the Kaiser foundation’s numbers. (FYI: The Kaiser Foundation is a lefty anti gun pseudoscience think tank)
Averaging the data they publish for the past 21 years, they claim that the annual firearm death rate in the US was 10.75 per 100,000. That equates to 225.75 people per 100,000 over the past 21 years. Or in other words, one person in 445 has died a so-called “gun death” in the past 21 years. Even if you assume that each person killed is from a unique family, for 1 in 5 people to have had a firearm death in their family would mean family sizes of 89 people. The math doesn’t stop there.
The average family size in the US has remained stable at 3.1 people. The statistic is impossible, even if you count grandparents, siblings, cousins, and more. The entire study is pseudoscientific garbage.
4 Comments
tfourier · April 11, 2023 at 2:36 pm
That “paper” was written by a bunch of women with poli sci degrees. The very definition of the mathematically illiterate. In person their cluelessness is only matched by their command of poli sci talking points. i.e Cliches. And their complete inability to understand the many basic logical contradictions in what they are saying. Which is pretty much all of it.
Nolan Parker · April 11, 2023 at 5:24 pm
I lived in Odessa Texas back when it was the murder capital of America. I WAS the demographic most represented in those statistics. And even then I didn’t know anyone who had lost a family member.
Aesop · April 11, 2023 at 7:08 pm
It’s even simpler to debunk than that.
If you ask Google, they answer, relying mostly on statista.com, that there are 84 million families, and 130M households, in the U.S. at present.
That would require a body stack of 16.8M dead people from guns.
Grant that every family has 4 related family groups.
So that still requires 4.2M gun deaths.
Granting that all firearms deaths from all causes (suicides, homicides, and accidents) are 30,000/year/forever (which they obviously haven’t been) it would take 140 years(!!!) to rack up a dead body count that high.
They’d have to be counting relatives from 4 generations ago killed settling the frontier, from 5 generations ago shot in the Civil War, and from 8 generations ago shot in the Revolutionary War, to get to that number.
And they’d have to be counting relatives from 140 other countries killed in a century of warfare Somewhere Else, and removed from modern descendants by similarly long multi-generational spans, to be within astronomical units (the mean distance between the Sun and Earth: 93,000,000 miles) of the number they’d need.
Color me shocked: They’re pulling numbers wildly from out of their own ass, which is why that number is full of shit.
QED
oldvet50 · April 12, 2023 at 6:09 am
I misread it. I thought it was a very believable statement at first.
“1 in 5 people in the US has a family member who has died after receiving the shot.”
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