Don’t believe misleading study to back Seattle gun tax plan

The problem with ideologues who are anti-gun is they won’t let facts get in the way of their arguments. They simply dismiss context, pull out a scary stat from a study, and use it to coerce you into taking their side.

Case in point: Seattle City Council Member Tim Burgess and his effort to justify his gun tax idea. Burgess trotted out data from a 2014 Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center study funded by the Seattle City Council to the tune of $153,000. In fact, for the last year, he has been pushing a talking point that “gun violence begets gun violence.”

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Burgess said this week that this study shows that “…someone admitted to Harborview for a gun shot injury is 30 times more likely to be re-admitted for an additional gunshot injury than other non-injury patients admitted to the hospital.” (It’s almost verbatim from the press release he posted July 7, 2014).

When he says “someone” he’s referring to very specific someones: criminals.

Some direct quotes from the study (please, read it):

-“…50 percent of those admitted for firearm injuries and 47 percent of those admitted for injuries from assault had an arrest in the prior 5 years.”

-“One quarter of individuals hospitalized with a gunshot wound were arrested within the next 5 years for a violent or gun-related crime.”

-“More than 45 percent of individuals hospitalized with gunshot wounds or injuries due to an assault were subsequently arrested for non-violent crimes…”

In other words, these are criminals. The numbers from this study are highly influenced by criminals who use guns. It should not be shocking to you that criminals who use guns are at a higher likelihood of suffering multiple gunshot injuries. Burgess doesn’t push out a stat that takes out the criminal element from the study. That would be a more fair way to look at the data.

Part of the reason anti-gun activists don’t trot out that data is because if you look at unintentional gun injuries, the numbers are very low. In fact, King County reports that “[b]etween 2006 and 2010, there were two cases among King County residents” who were killed from a firearm injury.

The other reason? It would force the activists to look at the person behind the gun and since they don’t have any great plans to prevent criminals from using guns, they focus on the weapon itself.