No, sadly, I will not be embarking upon the venture of dismantling how the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Ownership abused statistics in order to make their “Scorecard” say what they want it to.
Why?
Well, to begin with, they do not publish their vaunted “comprehensive grading rubric”, so there is no way to examine the source data. And if you cannot see the source data, the “scorecard” is meaningless.
Worse, they openly admit to cooking the books. For example, in reference to Alaska, their scorecard says:
Alaska did not pass any significant gun laws in 2017. Despite its remote location, Alaska exports crime guns to other states at nearly twice the national average and has the highest gun death rate in the nation.
First off, claiming that Alaska has “no law” concerning “Concealed Carry Permitting” is simply a bald-faced lie, as Alaska Statutes Section 18.65.700 clearly indicates. Yes, Alaska is a Constitutional Carry state, but they will still issue you a license if you want one, meaning they do not have “no laws” about permits.
In the same vein, claiming Alaska has “no law” pertaining to “Background Checks” is a half-truth, at best. No, the state may not have any such laws, but there are a number of federal laws that govern the sale of firearms, even in private transactions – but the liars at the Giffords Law Center want you to forget that.
Continuing with the text beneath the graphic, doing what the “gun control” extremists want you to do is rewarded, above and beyond simply having the laws in place. Interestingly, this rather plainly exposes the incrementalist nature of the “gun control” movement – states will only keep getting a positive score for “passed significant gun laws” if they… well, keep passing significant gun laws. In other words, “gun control” extremists are not going to be happy until all the books are burned.
Further, states are being penalized for crimes that were committed in other states, meaning that things like firearm-related murders are being counted twice (if the firearm used came from another state).
Finally and most damning, they freely admit to creating the same positive-feedback-loop that was so notable in the 2015 Brady Campaign “Scorecard”, by way of penalizing states for having high “gun death” rates. They are literally attempting to correlate “gun deaths” against a score that includes “gun deaths” as one of its metrics – no wonder there is a positive correlation. (And this is all without even getting into the intentionally-misleading notion of including suicides in the total “gun deaths” count.)
So I guess I should give their lawyers some credit – they finally realized that publishing their data only enables people like me to tear it apart. But that just means they are compounding obfuscation on top of falsehoods and abuses of mathematics.
In other words, this is nothing more than “business as usual” for “gun control” extremists.
graphical representation 