http://www.unionleader.com/article....rticleId=587d027a-0e36-456a-b39e-fbd5e19afae6
Dave Workman: The anti-gun lobby misleads us with false data on officer deaths
By DAVE WORKMAN
Tuesday, Sep. 25, 2007
ONCE AGAIN the anti-gun lobby is trying to convince Congress and the American public that so-called "assault weapons" should be banned because so many police officers are dying in the line of duty.
And predictably, the effort is founded on falsehood and hysteria, designed to fool and alarm people into supporting a political agenda that ultimately would legislate gun ownership out of existence.
Recently, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (which should more accurately call itself the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership) issued a statement containing figures on the annual number of law enforcement deaths in America. Buried in their news release was this remarkably transparent canard: "More officers are killed with firearms than through any other single cause."
We know that's false because the same news release provided readers with the evidence. Said the release: "According to the National Law Enforcement Memorial, there have been 132 officer fatalities in the U.S. so far this year, with 54 killed by a firearm. In all of last year, 145 officers died in the line of duty, 52 due to firearms. In 2005, 50 officers were killed with firearms."
First, the 2005 figure is wrong. There were 59 officers killed by gunfire that year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), out of a total of 162 officer fatalities. Second, the Brady Campaign can claim that guns are the top killer only by ignoring officers killed in motor vehicle incidents.
According to the NLEOMF, the same source the Brady Campaign cited, in the past 10 years, 582 of the 1,649 police officers who died on the job were shot to death. By contrast, 707 were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So the single largest cause of officer fatalities is traffic accidents, not gun deaths. The Brady Campaign is misleading the American public.
Police work is risky. But the biggest risk comes from motorized transportation, not firearms. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, working as a police officer is not as risky as working as a logger, commercial fisherman, roofer, construction worker, pilot or truck driver.
Anti-gunners like the Brady folks also know that relatively few cops are killed with so-called "assault weapons." But they want those guns banned, perhaps to establish a precedent that would make banning another type of firearm a little easier in the future.
The Brady Campaign launched this new attack on firearms by exploiting a recent shooting in Florida in which Miami-Dade Sgt. Jose Somohano was killed and three other officers were wounded by gunman Shawn LaBeet, himself killed later by police.
In editorializing against firearms after that shooting, the Miami Herald couldn't even get its facts right when it tried to link the Miami shooting to the Virginia Tech shootings, gasping, "Seung-Hui Cho used a high-capacity assault weapon to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech last April."
That is not true. Cho used a handgun, which he purchased at retail, apparently by lying on a federal form and clearing a background check.
The anti-gun crowd, which includes far too many reporters and editors who ought to do some homework before sitting down at a keyboard, hates guns and ultimately wants them all banned. That crowd's misleading use of data to accomplish this should tell us all we need to know about the nobleness of their cause.
Dave Workman is senior editor of Gun Week (www.gunweek.com).
