Steve Nash goes in on gun debate with completely false statement on firearms in US
Tens of thousands of students and others participated in the “March for Our Lives” gun control demonstration Saturday in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
The event was organized in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people.
Joining the marchers were a number of celebrities who spoke at the rally or expressed their support through other means.
One of those was former NBA star Steve Nash.
I’m marching in LA today. Please find your nearest march and support this life and death matter. #NeverAgain https://t.co/CFMviwgUPu
— Steve Nash (@SteveNash) March 24, 2018
Not only did Nash join the demonstrators Saturday, he also who wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune in February encouraging people to attend the march.
“I’m angry,” wrote Nash. “Innocent people are dying senselessly in a country that has so much to offer the world.”
Saying he believes “we should try to take as many guns out of our society as possible,” Nash presented what he called “the facts on gun violence in America.”
Among them was this jaw-dropper: “A mass shooting happens ONCE A DAY on average.”
That’s 365 mass shootings a year.
If you’re having trouble remembering these daily mass shootings, don’t worry — you don’t have amnesia. Nash’s “fact” is anything but.
He, like many others pushing for gun control, apparently drew his information from a claim — reported in The Washington Post and repeated throughout liberal media — that the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015 was the 355th of the year.
The number originated from a Reddit gun control forum called GunsAreCool.
And it is quite a stretch.
The actual number of mass shootings in 2015 is a tiny fraction of what Nash and others claim — and that’s according to the editor of the liberal magazine Mother Jones.
In an op-ed in The New York Times, Mark Follman wrote that Mother Jones has “compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings.”
“By our measure, there have been four ‘mass shootings’ this year, including the one in San Bernardino,” Follman said.
The total from 1982 through 2015 was 73 — or just over two mass shootings per year.
The numbers are going up — according to the FBI, there were over 11 mass shootings per year from 2000 to 2013 — but that’s a far cry from one a day.
The reason for the massive discrepancy? GunsAreCool redefined “mass shooting” to fit its agenda.
Said Follmer: “The founder of the ‘shooting tracker’ project, who currently goes by the handle ‘Billy Speed,’ told me it was his choice: ‘Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ definition of mass shooting.'”
AWR Hawkins, who writes about Second Amendment issues for Breitbart, explained how it works.
“How do the numbers get so skewed?” Hawkins said. “They get skewed because gun controllers get their information from websites and studies that count incidents in which four people are shot as a mass shooting, whether those people only suffer minimal injuries or not. This means gang crimes — drive-by shootings, etc. — are reclassified as ‘mass shootings.’ Other gang-related shootings become ‘mass shootings’ as well. All the while, the FBI’s standard definition for a ‘mass shooting’ is four fatalities in one incident.
“So Steve Nash’s claims are very similar to the claim of ‘355 mass shootings’ each year, and have already been debunked.”
Although Nash is a citizen of Canada, the eight-time All-Star has every right to argue for gun control in the United States.
But it would be nice if he would make his case without stretching the truth.
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