On Tuesday, we reported on a Toronto Star article that twisted immigration data to advocate gun control. The article, titled “A young person is shot every day in Ontario, Sick Kids study finds,” counted those up to 24 years old as a “child or youth” to back its suspect claim.
Now we learn that 80 percent of those injuries were among people 15 years or older. Even more outrageous, the study—published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal—used a ludicrous definition of “firearm” to drastically inflate their totals. In cases where the type of firearm used was known, 78 percent of the injuries were caused by “pellet, airsoft and paintball guns—not rifles, shotguns and handguns …”
A defensive Dr. Natasha Saunders claimed, “The messaging from our paper wasn’t, ‘OK, now we have to restrict all firearms and be tighter around this.’” Not so fast, doc: You and co-author Dr. Astrid Guttman explicitly advocated several gun control measures, including encouraging doctors to question patients about guns, enacting safe storage laws and “enforcement of gun-control legislation”—and you positioned your fake gun injuries as “an important public health problem.”
Perhaps Drs. Saunders and Guttman should work on their truth problem first.
