What's the Actual Number One Cause of Death in Children?

Is the right to bear arms responsible for
being the #1 cause of child gun deaths?
Is it time to abolish the 2nd Amendment?

Some people I like today said on camera that the number one cause of death of children was guns. First off, I would think that the number one cause of death was shooters. Secondly, it's a deceptive, manipulative lie. That's because the statistics are manipulated by changing the definition of "children".

Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century Prime Minister of England, once opined, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, the number one cause of death in children requires some serious manipulation of the numbers and definition. If you look it up in most anti-gun websites, gun related deaths in children top motor vehicle accidents, other sorts of accidents and individually each other cause of death such as illness, poisoning, murder, and manslaughter. Here's how you do it.

Infants seldom die of gun violence, so
they are not included in the child death
rate by guns statistics to avoid bringing
down the "numbers" of child gun deaths.

If you define a "child" as aged from one to nineteen, you arguably get somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand children's deaths. The reason they don't include age 0 to 1 numbers is because it would remove gun deaths from the number one spot. The death from natural causes is significantly higher as babies are fragile creatures and we caregivers don't get a lot of training before they are born. Meanwhile, even with the age of children being extended to include 18 to 19 years old the 0-12 month death rate from "other than guns" is pretty significant and not many babies often die from being shot. 

These guys have inordinate numbers of gun deaths,
so they are counted as children to inflate the
child gun deaths numbers.

The reason the definition doesn't exclude 18 to 19-year-olds from being counted as children is that leaving them out would cut the number of child gun death numbers in half. Including murders and suicide by depressed teens and teenage gang members from Chicago, LA and Detroit, runs up the numbers of so-called deaths by gun violence. The inflated numbers glommed onto the child death stats makes no allowance for kids killed in mass shootings in "gun-free" zones by 18 to 26 year olds using illegally obtained guns nor for the cops shooting the shooter. He gets counted as a child gun death. I don't know about you, but "children" age 18 and up don't seem much like children at that age. If you can be tried as an adult, I believe you ARE an adult. Don't be blowing smoke up my skirt by telling me that someone who shaves (face or legs I don't care) is a child. 

And yet well-meaning people get all in a twitter because they believe that toddlers are shooting each other in droves based on this statistical picture being painted by the anti-gun lobby. This is the picture such statistical manipulation is supposed to create in your mind. It's the same with adult gun death statistics. When our progressive friends talk about "victims" of gun violence, they cite statistics that are deliberately skewed to make you believe these are people who died at the hands of criminals or in gun accidents. What they don't tell you is that whenever a cop shoots a criminal caught in the act, when a homeowner shoots a home invader in self-defense, when a citizen with a gun puts a stop to a mass shooter, or when a father shoots a farm hand who is raping his daughter in the barn (true story), it is recorded as a death by "gun violence."  No one records statistics when a Florida grandmother chases off a pair of home invaders by waving her shotgun at them or when a young mother with toddlers fires a shot at thieves ransacking her home or when an 89-year-old man is charged by a 20-year-old thief intent on looting the house next door and cops are an hour away according to the 911 operator. In Texas, charges against the old guy are dismissed automatically based on the "he needed killin'" principle.

The thing is that half of the gun-violence-against-children gun death numbers are created by "kids" who look like the picture above on the right. It's not a true picture of those "gun deaths" but it certainly distracts Mom & Pop America from the true purpose of all the talk about massive gun confiscation going on in the halls of power and in the media these days. 

It's important to note that every tyrannical government in history first finds an excuse to disarm the citizenry. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The Communists disarmed the proletariat, the Chinese under Mao disarmed the peasants. Then they piled up the guns and burned them and came back the next day and piled up anyone who owned more than one ox and burned them. 

I'm not mad at the people who believe the lies, though. They think they understand and are appalled, accepting the lies that the politicians and media spoon-feed them. Who can blame them for  trusting that they are being told the truth? The sad thing is that the political party that has long claimed to be the party of the people, the party of the working man, has made common cause with wealthy individuals and corporations and conspired to dump the rest of us into a heap they call the collective. And they want to make sure we won't be troublesome or able to resist when our betters decide they need to visit a "reeducation" facility because they disagree with the new order and won't shut up about it.

Someone I respect described these collectives or "unions" as bound up in bundles to be burned at the end of time. Statistics like the phony gun death statistics are the matches and make no mistake. They will not hesitate to light the pyres.

And the number one cause of death for children 0 through 17 is motor vehicle accidents by a good bit. Oddly, enough no one has called for private citizens not being licensed to drive cars an activity demonstrably more dangerous to actual children 

As I'm wont to say, "I believe Jesus is loading up the bus to come get us from this crazy place and take us home."

© 2023 by Tom King

The Thing About Statistics

Helping you see what you wanna see.

To make surveys and statistical research instruments more accurate we are taught to insure that nothing about the conditions of the test encourages one group to participate or not participate more than others. I took two graduate level statistics courses to learn that. Of course, the other guys who took those graduate statistics courses know this and, as I did, learned all the sneaky ways there are to make a study or survey's data say what the researcher wanted it to. 

 

Knowing how to game the system is a very valuable skill in the political marketplace. So long as the researcher is careful to make these sorts of tricks very hard to find for the normal person untutored in the ways of statistical analysis, statisticians can make very good money designing studies that skew the results in exactly the way the client wants it skewed in order to make the study say what the client wanted it to say. 

Why do you think the polls had Hillary winning by a landslide in 2016? First it would convince the voters that her victory would be inevitable and people would either vote with the perceived herd or not bother to vote at all since there was no chance Trump would win.

The other reason the polls favored Hillary was that by selecting a data sample from large urban areas, there would naturally be more left-leaning respondents in the sample. It's a little trick called selective sampling. It was profitable to do so, because the people paying for those polls (mostly the liberal media) don't like to buy studies that don't show progressives winning. Conservative media is a much smaller niche market.

That's why so few polls tend to show conservatives ahead, especially in the early stages of an election and right at the end. Often they feel some guilt in the middle and publish a more accurate data set, but go back to the more profitable selective sampling and rigged questions that skew the results their way.

The US census is a golden opportunity every ten years to bend statistics to the service of the deep state. The federal and state bureaucracy has a natural inclination to prefer left-leaning big government politicians and therefore are highly motivated to tell them what they want to here and by extension, tell the public at large what big government liberals want the public to hear. Government employees keep their jobs where they sit at desks all week accomplishing little and getting paid on Friday by telling the people who vote to enlarge government bureaucracy what they want to hear.

Just giving out my little warning here. Don't put too much stake in polls in a race that's close to the wire. Herd instinct will pull many voters toward the side that seems to be winning. One of the reason Trump likes big rallies and parades is that the visuals there help overcome the negative polls and tend to neutralize the media bias with voters as they stand in the booth punching out those chads!

© 2020 by Tom King

 

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Well we all "know" that police murder young black men with impunity (that means whenever they feel like it for those of you in Rio Linda). NFL players are kneeling during the national anthem because it's such an epidemic of official oppression that someone needs to stand up to it (apparently by kneeling down which doesn't make a lot of sense unless they are praying which they are not). White cops are hunting down and killing tens of thousands of young black men.

At least that's what you are meant to believe.

But the numbers game is as Benjamin Disraeli described it - "...lies, damned lies and statistics." Let's look a violence against the Police, where the narrative can be somewhat at variance to the facts. In 2016, for example, 135 police officers were killed. There are around 900,000 law enforcement officers of one sort or another in the country. According to one set of relatively reliable statistics, cops are 32 times more likely to be killed by citizens than the other way around. In those shootings, the perpetrator has a 50 percent chance of being black.

Let's use the "progressive" approach and parse that statistic against percentage of population. Since blacks make up just over 13% of the population against 87% of us are some other race, that means that a mere 13% of the population kill half the cops that are murdered each year.

Let's look at the claim that white cops are the killers. It turns out that black police officers are 330% more likely to fire their guns at a crime scene than any other ethnic group of cops. When a black cop is shooting at black Americans, the numbers are even higher.

But how can that be? Fat overfed football divas are kneeling during the national anthem? They wouldn't do that if cops weren't really hunting down and killing young innocent black men. Well, as it turns out, what you feel must be true may not necessarily be true. One can take the same batch of statistics and select out bits and reframe them and voila' - white cops can be made to seem to be murdering poor innocent black people with impunity.

Don't get me wrong. The problem isn't race. No race of people are entirely to blame. Black people are not bad people as a race. They've gotten mistreated for sure. They've been lied to, manipulated and kept down, not by white men, cops or otherwise, but by a political system playing head games with the black community. Malcolm X recognized the problem. "Both (liberals and conservatives) want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives."

The problem is that what to many seemed a well-meaning attempt to "end poverty" (a good thing) was created and managed by a cynical, power-loving group of individuals that have deliberately created vast islands of institutionalized poverty, dependency, anger, monolithic voting, and resentment against the enemies of the people who put them in this unhappy position. In selling our political views, manipulating statistics and rigging the welfare system to keep people in poverty so they'll vote the right way, we've triggered a backlash. I say "we" because good people have forgotten how God has led us in the past and sat by and let them do it. We even enjoyed feeling good about what was being done without actually looking at the damage that was being done by it to black families, culture and community.

The thing is, I don't blame black folk for being angry. They have been practiced upon by the political upper classes. I don't condone it, but I also understand why racism hasn't vanished as it should have after the Civil War. It has been in the interest of politicians to keep the warfare between races going. Racial tension gets elite folks re-elected.

If politicians keep dividing people into victim groups by race, war is what they're going to eventually get. Who knows, the more sinister politicians may actually be hoping for such a war so that some form of marshal law can be put into effect which will allow a massive seizure of power such as happened in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's China. Mild-mannered university professors, some of whom have been consultants to the White House in the previous administration, have suggested that collapsing the economy would be a good thing, in that it would allow for the establishment of a socialist state in the ensuing confusion. They do this seemingly with no recognition of misery this would cause the very people they claim to be helping.

All of this game of statistics is nothing more than manipulation for political purposes. Both sides of the argument do it sadly. Far right "conservatives" do it. Far left "liberals" do it. People in the middle fall for it because most of us never take a statistics class in school. I've taken three graduate level statistics classes. It's hard to read the news without getting my blood pressure raised because of it. I know their nasty little tricks and how they manipulate statistics.

This is a power game, folks. You are being fed cold-blooded propaganda as surely as if Joseph Goebbels was running the media. Sometimes I think his ghost is running it. After all, Goebbels was a socialist!

© 2017 by Tom King

More Gun Laws / Fewer Gun Deaths / Safer Criminals

Think of all the criminals whose lives we'll save.....

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Call it an on-the-job safety measure for working burglars

A Yahoo News story this morning sounded the initial trumpet for a study that shows the stricter gun laws mean fewer gun deaths.  This study will become the center of an artificial media firestorm in favor of gun control over the next few days.  The study will be cited endlessly as "proof".  Note, however, that the headline carefully states that gun laws mean fewer gun deaths, not fewer murders. And by the way, they count burglars, intruders, muggers and thugs who are shot by citizens in self-defense or by police as "gun deaths".

A similar study in England also found there were fewer "gun deaths" after they enacted gun laws.  What they didn't tell you was that deaths by poisoning, bludgeoning, knife attacks and other means went up sufficiently to more than compensate for reductions in death by guns.  There is actually evidence that the murder rate overall either climbed or did not change. In addition, crimes with handguns have doubled, gang-related gun crimes have exploded to the point that formerly unarmed British Bobbies are now carrying guns in self-defense.  Ironic in that under the British gun laws, self-defense is not considered a good reason for getting a gun license.

I suspect if the American study had compared the "gun death" rate to the overall murder rate they would have found either no change in the murder rate or that murder rates rose (especially in more dangerous places like Chicago). 

Murder is murder and, apparently, if you take away one weapon, people simply find other means to kill.  So instead of being shot, you get bludgeoned to death.  Is that somehow a better way to go? Oh, and by the way, you can't shoot back.  So, if your attacker is larger than you, you will soon have no way to equalize things since you can't legally defend yourself with a gun.  Gives the bad guys a sporting chance, what?

I have wondered how long it would take the anti-gun lobby to gin up this sort of study.

As Benjamin Disraeli once noted, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics."

I'll leave it to you to determine which category this latest "proof" belongs to.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

What Next? Road Control Laws?



Without roads people wouldn't be able to drive
cars anywhere so they wouldn't have car
accidents anymore and the middle class would
be preserved - right?



I took two graduate courses in statistics and research. One thing I learned is that Benjamin Disraeli’s purported comment about statistics is true.  There are, in fact, “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”  Used properly statistics can be quite useful. They show us which medications work, what problems our society needs to solve and Mark Twain’s overall negativity at different stages in his life.  The study was based on the number of times he used a form of the word “NO” in Huckleberry Finn vs. Tom Sawyer.  It’s burning issues like that now that really show off the power of statistics. 

We are constantly showered with meaningful statistics on the news, in books, magazines and even in our Sabbath sermons. For some reason we accept cold mathematical statistics as proof over almost any other form of persuasive data. After all, how can math lie?

Well you might ask.  The truth is, math doesn’t lie.  People lie. They just use math as a tool to support the lies.  One group uses statistics to prove that gun control doesn’t work.  Another uses statistics to prove that it does.  Throw in a few logical sounding anecdotes and you’ve got enough proof for your average drive-by consumer of information - whichever he happens to hear that most closely meets his already preconceived notions.

I stumbled across an interesting set of statistics from the WHO today that I’d like to throw out there for your consideration and to point out how you can get a wrong-headed conclusion from any statistic.  I was looking at worldwide causes of death as parsed out by the income levels of the country in question.  Of the top 10 leading causes of death, the first nine are all forms of disease. The slaughter caused by so-called “natural causes” runs to a staggering 28.32 million deaths annually. We don’t get to the first non-natural cause of death till we get to #10: Road traffic accidents.  More than 1.21 million people die as a result of road-related accidents.

These roads must be stopped.  Ah, but “No!” says the chairman of the American Automobile Association. “Roads do not kill people.  People using roads kill people.” 

Immediately the chairman of the Amelgamated Society to Stop Highways and Open Lanes from Existing shoots back, “Well that’s just absurd. Everybody knows that when the nation of Lower Bulemia banned roads altogether, road-related accidents dropped by 46%.

Next thing you know, you’ve got some fool in Congress sponsoring a National Roads Limitation Act, especially after he sees polls that say that 52% of people in his district support the idea.

Or better yet, let the progressive socialists get hold of it.  Did you know that according to WHO, road accidents are highest among middle-income nations; ranking seventh in total deaths in middle income nations. Road accidents don't even show up in the top ten causes of death among poor and rich nations.  So, now roads are obviously a threat to the middle class.  Amid much hand-wringing and cries of “What shall be done to save our middle class from all the road-related carnage?”  The media starts pouring on stories about how roads are at war with the middle class and they lay the blame at the feet of the construction companies that build roads.  If it wasn’t for their incessant greed which drives this road-building madness, thousands of innocent middle class people would still be alive and actually going to the polls themselves to vote for Democrats.

“I know,” some bright would-be member of central planning says. “Let’s get rid of roads and we can all ride trains.”  The reasoning is like this.  Poor people don’t drive so that’s why road accidents are fewer in poor nations.  Rich people don’t need to go anywhere on roads, the central planner reasons, because everything gets brought to them by the middle class and the poor, so they don't need to drive on roads. Either that, or they fly helicopters, take their yachts or hire chauffeurs. In any case, the top 1% don’t need to use roads which road accidents don’t make top ten list. 

Therefore, using our best Socratic logic, as learned watching David Letterman on late night TV, road accidents makes the top ten death toll in middle income nations because:

1. Using roads is what kills so many middle class people. 
2. If these roads didn’t exist, middle class people couldn’t use them.
3. If middle class people could no longer use roads and used trains instead then…..
4. The death rate by road related accidents would go down if we passed a law banning roads.

Voila!  Something gets done. A law is passed.  Passing a law is always the solution step on any progressive's list of logical reasons we must do something about anything that shows up in the news. Remember the progressive creed. Never waste a good crisis! And to the progressive socialist, passing a law is always the thing that must be done since passing laws, according to their creed, solves everything.

Of course, nothing ever actually gets done about reducing the number of roads cause to the surprise of central planning, people actually need roads and trains are too danged expensive.  A new federal bureaucracy gets created, however.  It becomes more costly to build roads what with all the new paperwork.  The existing roads deteriorate because instead of maintaining them, the funding is going toward paying for the new road reduction regulations.

And the final kick in the teeth - death by train wrecks rise.

But, what about the dingbat who thought the whole thing up? Well he gets himself re-elected because the media trumpets said dingbat’s spectacular success at getting “important” legislation passed and nobody bothers to ask whether any of his legislation did any actual good.

And civilization careens merrily on down its poorly maintained roads toward a certain destruction of its own making.  God save us all – or at least the 52% of us who want to be saved according to a recent Gallup Poll.

© 12/22/2012 by Tom King