It’s an all-too-familiar meme: Cherry-pick (or even fabricate) a few stats, absurdly extrapolate them to a supposed “norm,” and, voila, the stage is set for radical confiscation of Second Amendment rights. Such is the technique of Carol Costello, CNN Anchor, in a recent opinion piece.
How she gets there isn’t just shaky journalism, it’s simply rotten science. To make her point, she not only quotes serial fabricator Everytown for Gun Safety, but gets in a lick for the Holy Grail of all other gun banning, too—the licensing gambit a la motor vehicles: “ ... pass a test … before they are issued a license to obtain and shoot a gun?”
What her examples don’t take into account are the same-old, same-old as well: For each statistically rare, emotionalized negative she cites, conveniently forgotten are the literally tens of millions of proper uses and proofs of restraint that occur every single day.
