Michael Bloomberg’s Gun Violence Ad Is Wrong: The Data Is Off by 73%

Michael Bloomberg paid for and anti-gun ad during the Super Bowl, and while that isn’t all that surprising, what’s even less shocking is how bad he bungled the statistics. He was off by 73%, which amounts to a straight-up lie.

Michael Bloomberg’s Super Bowl ad, which presents the Democratic presidential contender as a brave advocate of public safety who is not afraid to take on “the gun lobby,” claims “2,900 children die from gun violence every year” in the United States. This is far from the factual truth. That number includes young adults as well as minors, and it includes suicides as well as homicides.

Bloomberg’s campaign cited Everytown for Gun Safety, a Bloomberg-backed group, as the source of the number used in the ad. “Annually,” the organization said in June 2019 fact sheet, “nearly 2,900 children and teens (ages 0 to 19) are shot and killed.” The ad changed “children and teens” (including young adults) to “children,” presumably because that makes the deaths more shocking, strengthening the emotional case for the gun control policies Bloomberg favors.

According to to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FactCheck.org notes, the average number of firearm-related deaths involving Americans 17 or younger from 2013 through 2017 (the period used by Everytown for Gun Safety) was about 1,500, roughly half the number cited by Bloomberg. Furthermore, nearly two-fifths (40%, or 600) of those deaths were suicides, meaning the number of minors killed each year by “gun violence,” as that term is usually understood, is about 73 percent smaller than the figure cited in Bloomberg’s ad.-Reason

The real number is about 900, not 2900, based on the statistics made available by the very same people who want to disarm everyone.

The case highlighted by the TV ad does not actually fit into any of these categories, either. It is most accurately described as voluntary gang violence, although it was made to appear that the person shot was a random victim. The ad features Calandrian Kemp, whose 20-year-old son, George, was shot to death in 2013 at a park in Richmond, a Houston suburb, during a confrontation that a Texas appeals court described as “gang-related.” According to the court, “two groups of young men, most of them teenagers, had met that night for a fight.” Two of them, including an 18-year-old, Corey Coleman, fired the handgun rounds that struck Kemp. Coleman was convicted of murder and sentenced to 34 years in prison, according to Reason. 

Bloomberg’s gun law plans would also have little to no effect on the gang-related activity that killed Kemp. Bloomberg wants to ban “assault weapons” (Kemp was shot with a handgun), raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21 (Coleman and other gang members are not buying their guns in places where ID is needed) and passing more “red flag laws” (gang members aren’t going to tattle on each other.)

To read more about Bloomberg’s plans to eliminate private gun ownership stop “gun violence” click here. 

This article has been contributed by SHTF Plan. Visit www.SHTFplan.com for alternative news, commentary and preparedness info.