It Got Good To Them

One of our two major political parties depends on a great number of its member continuing to believe a great number things that are not merely false, but A)  deliberately falsified to flatter their biased and keep them stupid and, B) easily verifiable as false.

And yet no matter how big a facthammer you cosh them over the head with, they will still go right on believing them.

Baseball Bats and Hammers Do Not Kill More People Than Guns

Why do people keep saying they do?

By Brian Palmer|Posted Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013, at 1:54 PM ET

Georgia congressman Paul Broun claimed after Tuesday’s State of the Union address that “There are more people killed with baseball bats and hammers than are killed with guns.” Explainer readers may remember Broun as the congressman who believes the Earth is 9,000 years old. What about his hammer and baseball bat claim?

He’s wrong again, but he’s getting warmer. According to FBI data, 8,583 people were murdered with firearms in 2011. Only 496 people were killed by blunt objects, a category that includes not just hammers and baseball bats but crowbars, rocks, paving stones,statuettes, and electric guitars. Broun was off by a factor of at least 17 this time, a significant improvement on his estimate of the age of the Earth. The blue planet is 4.54 billion years old, or more than 500,000 times older than Broun believes it to be.

Guns are, undeniably, the American murderer’s weapon of choice. The number of people murdered with firearms in 2011 was more than twice the number murdered by every other means combined, including fists, swords, poison, explosives, arson, and strangulation.

Those statistics are for intentional killings only. What about accidental deaths? According to data from the CDC, 606 people were killed in gun accidents in 2010. The number of people accidentally killed by any piece of sporting equipment was 18. Four people were killed by nonpowered hand tools such as hammers.
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