Democratic presidential candidates want you to be very afraid. They specifically want you to be afraid of mass shooters and medical bankruptcy. But on both, their scare tactics rely on very bad math.
Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso, Texas, has tried to once again jump-start his stalled presidential campaign and is using mass shootings and his own foul language — when did presidential candidates start throwing F-bombs? — to get the motor running again.
“People are living with fear, feel like they have targets on their backs right now. Kids afraid to go to school tomorrow morning,” O’Rourke said on Face the Nation.
Fear is natural, but it isn’t always rational. So before we start outlawing guns, let’s look at some actual numbers.
You will die one day, but you will almost certainly not be murdered with a gun. Only 0.0045% of the population dies from gun homicide in any given year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Put another way, only half of 1% of all deaths are firearm homicides.
Those deaths are sad and reprehensible, but they do not make an epidemic — certainly not an epidemic of the sort Democrats make it out to be. If you believed their rhetoric, you would think gun homicides were mostly mass shootings with assault rifles at schools.
But the numbers tell a totally different story, as Washington Examiner commentary writer Brad Polumbo explained.
The number of public mass shootings is not increasing. According to James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, there are about 20 per year now, there were 20 per year over last decade, and there were about 20 per year in the 1990s, the 1980s, and in the late 1970s.
“Assault rifles” (an undefined scare-term) are not wiping people out by the thousands. In recent years, according to FBI data, murderers killed more people with shotguns than with all rifles (of which “assault rifles” are a subset).
The threat of school shootings is the Democrats’ most potent political weapon, for it is heartbreaking to see families shattered when children are murdered at school.
Thankfully, those deaths are exceedingly rare. Harvard instructor David Ropeik explained recently that the “risk of a school shooting is far lower than almost any other mortality risk children face, including traveling to and from school, catching a deadly disease while in school, or suffering a life-threatening injury playing interscholastic sports.”
While guns are a potent topic, the central issue of the 2020 Democratic primary is socialized health insurance, marketed as “Medicare for all.” To soften the blow of outlawing all of our healthcare plans, Democrats try to scare us about how medical bills will make us all poor under our current system.
Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have spent years claiming that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, supposedly causing half a million bankruptcies a year. Sanders has rolled out the number again, grabbing it from a deeply flawed study that in truth only found that two-thirds of bankruptcy cases included medical debt.
This is important. Sanders is implying that if we socialized medical expenses, those bankruptcies wouldn’t happen. That’s simply false. The best study finds that only about 4% of all bankruptcies are really “medical bankruptcies.”
These aren’t small matters. Abridging the right to bear arms and nationalizing health insurance are two of the central planks of the 2020 Democrats’ collective platform.
It tells you something when their two central policy positions rely so much on the abuse of data.
