Tuesday, February 04, 2014

 

Not Telling Us What We Already Know

When liberals are a little shaky on the logic and common sense elements of their arguments they often resort to an appeal to emotion, as in "Well, what if it were your child...?" That injection of emotion often satisfies the liberal but I think it does nothing to make their argument more persuasive. This unsigned editorial in the ever more execrable NYT offers the same trick appeal to emotion--it's for the children. What it really does, if you actually read the linked study, is confirm what everyone who ever watched the wonderful, terrible series The Wire, already knew.

The editorial, about gun control, leads off with Newtown, which apparently is part of the media style sheet now.

Far less noticed but no less horrific is the unending toll from the more routine bursts of gunfire that each day send an average of 20 American children and adolescents to hospitals, many of them for long-term treatment.
This grim statistic is found in a new study that focuses on the lasting damage suffered by young victims who survive. Of 7,391 hospitalizations of youths ages 19 and under shot in 2009, 6 percent ended in death; the rest joined the growing casualty list of gun victims, many needing lengthy and costly treatment, according to the study published in Pediatrics magazine. An estimated 3,000 additional youngsters died before reaching emergency rooms.
Notice that the editorial lumps together 19 year olds with toddlers, as if the toddlers suffered the same sort of gun casualty as the full adults aged 18 and 19. If you follow the link to the Pediatric study, this is what you find about gunshot wounds in 2009.

Gunshot wounds to ages 0-4,      175
Gunshot wounds to ages 5-9,      205
Gunshot wounds to ages 10-14,  699
Gunshot wounds to ages 15-19, 6,201

Oh, so the full adults and older teens are receiving six times the bullet wounds as all the real children, from birth through age 14, combined. Tragic, but not that surprising.

Black Americans aged 15-19 are 13 times more likely to be shot than white Americans of the same age sample.

So we have a problem of older teen and young adult blacks shooting each other in Democrat run cities over the illegal drug trade.


True that, as Omar would say.

But that's not how the liberal press sees it.

Where that old threat was external to America, the new threat is internal, spawned by the easy access to firearms that Congress refuses to adequately control.
Handguns, which do almost all the wounding of these young men, are prohibited for those under 21. Does the NYT editorial board not know this? What is it that the liberals think that Congress can do that Congress and the states haven't already done? Banning gun possession is unconstitutional. Banning assault weapons, which are rarely used to commit gun mayhem, is not solving the problem.
Limiting magazine size just makes the shooter change out magazines, in a few seconds, more often. Since this age group cannot legally obtain handguns under any circumstances, broadening or toughening the backround check system will also do nothing about this problem.

So the whole point of this seems to be an emotional cry to do something about children being shot even though most of the children are actually adults and there is nothing left to do legislatively. This is what passes for journalism in the liberal bubble.


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