Gun fight!

Usually, in a letters section, you get one chance to make your point and then that's it. Well, the Oklahoman does have its part-time columnists who write on the same stupid thing over and over again.... but you get my point.

Anyhow, after having his "Letter of the Month" run on guns, you figured that was it for Joe Moore of Oklahoma City. But no-- since someone actually went out and totally destroyed his letter, Mr Moore wrote back. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the Oklahoman ran that, too. It's point/counter-point on steroids.

Anyhow, Mr Moore writes:

In response to Mike Barnett (Your Views, Feb. 19), the FBI’s "justifiable homicide" data is incomplete. A number of cities (and the entire state of Illinois) flatly refuse to report crime statistics to the FBI. Additionally, the FBI's compiled numbers are based only on initial police reports and aren't updated by any subsequent information. They don't include prosecution results, grand jury or district attorney decisions, etc. Other data sources confirm the roughly 4,000 justifiable homicides in the U.S. in 2011.

Wait. This is a lot of information here. I realize it's a letter limited to 250 words so it's not like this guy can source everything, but did the Oklahoman just run this without checking if it's-- you know-- true? Like, is it true that the entire state of Illinois refuses to report crime statistics to the FBI??!? You can read through their website. You'd think that somewhere they'd say "hey, our stats for the entire state of Illinois are out of whack because the bastards won't give us information" if this were true. But I can't find it.

And given how hard we know that the Oklahoman's editors work to check facts, we can be sure they didn't lift a finger to delve into this more.

So, I guess we should just trust that Mr Moore-- a guy who is OK not counting a black teen-ager getting shot because, you know, he was in a gang-- has checked "other data sources" and of course his opinion is right.

And on it goes:

The University of Sydney’s 'study' ignored arrest reports and compiled its worldwide raw data only from court records, which — under strict Australian government mandate — were massaged to include only the least serious charge within each indictment. For instance, conviction of a defendant on the multiple charges of homicide, illegal firearm ownership and simple burglary was recorded only as burglary. In fact, several governments (including England and Wales) actually performed that 'massaging' before making the data publicly available.

Wait, wait. So how does this guy know this? I assume he's talking about this site, but I can't find anything about an Australian government mandate to massage statistics. And his objections don't make sense regardless. Like, we are talking about worldwide raw data. If it is all treated the same through this odd "mandate" then it should be a wash regardless.

And where is there evidence that England is also "massaging" gun statistics before making them available?? You can search, but the results tend to lead you to crazy conspiracy sites. It's a pretty bold statement to say that an entire country is fudging its crime statistics. Of course, since the editors probably live in the same right-wing echo chamber that Mr Moore lives in, they no doubt read this and thought "obv!" and assumed it was true because, well, some lunatic on Fox News said it was!

Anyhow, Mr Moore concludes:

Switzerland actually has more gun ownership rights than America. Adult Swiss citizens are required to keep firearms and ammunition in every household. The Swiss have the (verified) lowest crime rate in Europe. The Department of Justice verifies that the U.S. per-capita rate of total firearm deaths is indeed only eight per 100,000, which does rank 26th in the world. That’s not a 'contrived number.'

Jesus. As a clever commenter on the on-line Oklahoman letters page found, this is actually-- get this-- totally made up. Regarding Switzerland and its gun laws, a recent article in Time noted:

The law allows citizens or legal residents over the age of 18, who have obtained a permit from the government and who have no criminal record or history of mental illness, to buy up to three weapons from an authorized dealer, with the exception of automatic firearms and selective fire weapons, which are banned.

Are you kidding me?!? Right-wing nut job gun people would FLIP if this were the law of the land in the US. And yet Mr Moore cites this as a shining example?? What an idiot. Truly. An idiot.

As for the "contrived number" bit and the seemingly low ranking of the US in total firearm deaths: uh, look who has us beat. It's not like we are sitting behind Western countries like Germany or Spain. No, we are proud to have fewer gun-related deaths than places like Honduras, Columbia, and Mexico. So, good stat, Joe. Take out the drug lords and crime bosses in lawless places like Nicaragua and the US is right where it always is: #1.

In all, there is no way that a respectable newspaper would run a letter spouting off unverifiable fact after unverifiable fact. And then, when they are verifiable, they're just shown to be wrong. But the Oklahoman is not a real newspaper and will run anything--anything-- if it supports the crazed right-wing agenda of the editors.