Bowling for statistics

[Karen Cleary]

No rants about guns here, just a bit of info about a number:

By way of doing a google search on the term "11,127" and some associated 
keywords, such as firearms, I've located what I think may be the source 
of source of Michael Moore's disputed statistic:

"In 1999, a total of 28,874 firearm deaths occurred, according to such 
reports. Of this total, 11,127 were homicides or due to legal 
intervention; 16,599 were suicides; 824 were unintentional (accidental) 
shootings; and 324 were of unknown cause."

Why "legal intervention" deaths are included with homicides I can only 
speculate - perhaps the category could be loosely described as 
intentional shootings of another person as opposed to accidental 
shootings or intentional suicides. In any case, the report does not 
break down those numbers in further discussion. It does cite the 
National Center for Health Statistics publication  _Vital Statistics_ as 
the primary source for the data.

This brief  was written by William Kroase, Domestic Social Policy 
division of the Congressional Research Service. You know, those bleeding 
heart bambi-hugging pinko liberals bent on overthrowing the Constitution 
and confiscating all your hunting rifles. Uh, nope. Actually the CRS is 
a government agency, part of the Library of Congress, responsible for 
researching and briefing members of congress on legislative issues. 
Their web site goes on and on about their long history of providing 
objective, non-partisan, accurate, reliable information, etc. etc.: 
 http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/whatscrs.html

The briefs are not made publicly available by the CRS but you can 
purchase them, or, better yet, find them posted on various elected 
representatives' web sites. I found the one I quoted above, order code 
IB10071 "Issue Brief for Congress: Gun Control Legislation for the 107th 
Congress", posted here:
 http://shelby.senate.gov/legislation/leg_pdf/gun1.pdf

Yeah, I know that that version of the report was updated after Michael 
Moore's movie was shown at Cannes, but the part I quoted was surely 
available in earlier versions of that report or in that report's 
predecessor. Lumping "legal interventions" together with homicides 
appears to be boilerplate from version to version. In any version, it is 
an eminently reputable source, and I wouldn't fault anyone for using its 
figures. Lies and damn lies not withstanding.

I'll confess that I still haven't seen the movie myself. But I love just 
about everything Michael Moore has done that I have seen, and I'd take 
his word, or come to think of it, just about anyone's, over that of John 
Fund (the WSJ editorialist Sean cited) any day of the week. OK, I think 
I'll leave it at that.

Oh wait, one more thing, Michael Moore has a web site:
http://michaelmoore.com

Karen




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