I always get dismayed when I see questionable information passed off as facts on Facebook. The information isn’t passed on to inform for the most part, but is put out there as an affirmation of the poster’s personal position. Rarely do I see someone say “Here are some facts about an issue” and send out facts without bias.

Last year when the big storm hit New York, I has someone post information saying the Mayor was setting up ‘concentration camps” for people who refused to leave their apartment buildings. A picture and link to an article, which looked very professional, supposedly confirmed this claim. Of course, since I didn’t hear anything about this on what would be called mainstream news, it fit into the narrative that ‘the press’ was suppressing this story. It never occurred to the person who passed on the post that if someone in the press had this story, considering the controversial nature of it, it definitely would have been posted. Just reading the article, where the Mayor of New York said the comment at a press conference, made me believe it wouldn’t be suppressed. Further reading mentioned a popular local radio talk show host was put in one of the ‘concentration camp’ facilities, yet there was no mention of the incident by the talk show host!

A simple Google search showed the reporter who supposedly heard the Mayor not only didn’t work for a paper in the New York area, but had died years earlier. There was YouTube postings of the news conference and nothing of the sort was said. In other words, the statement about ‘concentration camps’ was fiction.

I bring up the old story because every few months I come across a story passed on to me by someone on Facebook that just doesn’t seem true. It normally takes less than a minute to confirm the story by Google and I would say in about 90% of those cases the story is completely false. The story is passed along because people on one side of an argument want to show they are right by passing on ‘facts’. The problem is by not checking the information they are passing along, and when the information proves to be false, it’s difficult for the person who passed it along to defend their argument.
Passions run high on the gun debate, and someone I know posted a picture on Facebook which off the bat made me suspicious. The photo claimed there were 2034 violent crimes per 100000 people in the UK while the United States had 466 violent crimes per 100000. Supposedly these were facts. I clicked on the link in the picture to the Facebook site where it originated from. People loved the photo chart and concluded the stats it mentioned were correct. Since the claim was made by a journalist, it must be right.

That same pesky thing showed up in the viral nature of the picture. If you are so inclined to think this way, if a journalist disagrees with your point of view then they are part of the ‘liberal elite’ and shouldn’t be listened to. They are giving opinions and not facts. When a journalist agrees with your position, somehow they are pillars of integrity. Now, if this were the 80s, we would have to take each journalist on their word when it comes to statistics, but this is 2013 and we have the Internet. This is what I found in 10 minutes of checking the on the Internet to verify the violent crime rate claim given:

From Wikipedia -
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) made a study in 2012 that includes most countries of the world. The following lists show only the most recent data. Intentional homicide in this case is defined as unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person

United Kingdom

1.2

722

Europe

Northern Europe

United States	4.8	14,748	Americas	Northern America
Mexico	22.7	25,757+	Americas	Northern America
Brazil	21.0	40,974	Americas	South America
India	3.4	40,752+	Asia	Southern Asia
China	1.0	13,410	Asia	Eastern Asia

The same organization gathers information for actual homicides by gun. Here are the figures of the same countries listed on the previous chart. These numbers are also for 2012.

So how can a ‘reporter’ claim the UK had 2034 violent crimes per 100000 when the official numbers show there were 722 homicides in 2012? Remember, those are all homicides, not just gun homicides. The official states show the number per 100000 is 1.2 per, while the US rate is 4.8 per 100000. Using the argument, which most do, that gun control doesn’t work by showing places that ban guns still have shootings is like saying we have chefs with knives yet people are stabbed all the time. You want to try and put a simple answer to a complicated question and you can’t do that. If you have an illness like cancer, you may have to do a number of different tests and treatments to get the cancer under control. Doing one thing won’t help the person.

One thing I found fascinating in checking statistics was seeing China and the United States had close to the same homicide rate. I clearly remember hearing a lot of liberal commentators mentioning how on that same day, there was a person in China who went to a school with knife to attack students. I believe 27 were injured and the narrative was since there is gun restrictions in China, a person with a knife, in this instance, didn’t come in with a gun and killed those 27 people.

What I find funny about the statement is both sides didn’t seem to check reports that are free out on the Internet. As I look at it, China only complicated the argument on both sides. You have a country where, according to the stats they have released, gun homicides don’t exist, yet the homicide numbers are close to what occurs in the US that has a proliferation of guns. Over half of the US homicides are by firearms. So in a country without any homicides by gun, people still find a way to kill one another.

With gun control we are trying to solve the issue without looking at all the facts and figures at our disposal. We want to keep things off the table in the name of the Constitution. We know people with guns are dangerous, but from what the China stats and others show, people in countries with few guns still find a way of killing themselves. We do know someone with a high capacity magazine and a ‘proper’ firearm can kill quite a number of people efficiently. Doesn’t it make sense, if a person is determined to kill a lot of people, make it difficult for them to accomplish that task? Honestly, if we were facing a zombie apocalypse the need for high magazines and rapid fire guns almost seems a good reason for them, but even with a zombie invasion we know they move slowly so one shot to the head takes them down. Rapid fire, someone could argue, would be a waste of bullets.

Honestly, we need to be honest about the gun debate. We have to stop thinking we can come up with one universal answer that will solve the problem forever. We can’t. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to lessen what is done in these killings or prevent individuals from getting the means for doing mass killings.