In the land of the blind…

It’s true. You can find anything on the internet.

I wish I could remember how I came across this article. I think it was when I was trying to find a comparison between the number of kids killed in senseless home tragedies compared to the number of criminals apprehended red-handed by gun-wielding citizens.

Not being any kind of Google expert, I did not find the stats I was looking for, but I did come across some interesting stuff as you may imagine. One piece entitled “12 Children A Day” caught my eye. I thought it might contain the numbers I was looking for.

After perusing the piece, I would have clicked the “Share on Facebook” button except apparently keepandbeararms.com is not equipped with this technology yet. Or perhaps Facebook is part of the vast, ever-shifting socialist conspiracy to relieve Americans of the burden of their Second Amendment protections.

This pugnacious Pulitzer-pursuer goes to some length to argue that the Left’s repeated, bleating whine about 12 American children a day dying from gun violence is a lie, a dodge, an exaggeration used to score political points.

The real number, the author goes on to argue, is only 11.5 children a day shot dead. He’s done the math and he has the figures to prove it (my fifth-grade math teacher would have loved him).

That extra half a dead child a day is a deliberate partisan lie, plain and simple.

If it seems callous to split hairs between twelve dead children a day and eleven and a half, you may not want to click through to the column. I should have mentioned that earlier.

The author goes on to enumerate his own set of facts to counter all the hokum and slick ‘mathematics’ the Left uses to promulgate its lies. Here are a few of my faves:

A toddler has more to fear from a backyard pool than from a gun.

This is true! Toddlers don’t have the upper body strength to lift a gun and accidentally shoot a playmate or sibling. And parents don’t usually put their kids in their gun closet to play and then get distracted by a phone call.

His next hypothetical is a beauty, and shows he’s really let his imagination roam in preparation for this piece:

Even with homicides, a child is 5 times more likely to die by fire than at the hands of someone with a gun.

Then he buttresses his argument with the truly puzzling, “Of course, fire extinguishers are a good thing for putting out fires just like guns serve a purpose for deterring crime.”

Uh… true dat?

And on he goes, listing one by one all the ways he’s found to kill more kids than guns every year. He’s like the John Wayne Gacy of gun advocacy. Unsurprisingly he completely ignores the fact that if we had the power to stop any of those other things that kill all those kids every year, we would. We’d be all over Congress like Bill Clinton at a press availability.

Then he introduces a bunch of important-looking numbers that I wouldn’t understand even if I agreed with them—numbers are my kryptonite. But here’s how he sums up his opinion about children committing suicide with legally purchased firearms: “Suicides don't count in a rational debate about the criminal misuse of guns;” maybe that’s where he’s getting his .5 children a day. To prove his point, he adds, “Japan's gun laws are RESTRICTIVE, and they have more suicides than America.”

In the author’s entire elaborate… bizarre defense of what to do about all these dead children accruing, only the discussion of guns is off the table. Drownings, cars, soccer practice (I’m not kidding, he brings up soccer practice in a conversation about gun violence), these ought to be considered too, but only in the context of the author’s list of ways to kill kids.

As soon as the context changes to guns and gun safety, however, 5,000 dead kids a year is just the price we pay to protect our freedom.

As if the author’s conservative cred hasn’t been thoroughly established by this point, he then spends his longest talking-point excoriating the plague of inner-city gang violence. It never hurts to throw a few red-button words or phrases in to stir up the base, and pushing racist buttons has never failed to produce results, from the “Dixiecrats” of the ’60s who fled their party in opposition to integration, to this last election’s primary candidate competition regarding which would-be American president would build the highest, longest, deadliest wall to stave off the threat of illegal Mexican immigrants.

Lest we think the author uncompassionate, he actually opens his final paragraph with, “The loss of life however it happens is a tragedy--even in the case of the gang members shooting gang members.”

Wow. Even in the case of gang members. This fellow is like a regular Mother Theresa, except instead of devoting a lifetime ministering to lepers in the slums of Calcutta, he expresses pro-forma regret at the loss of life, even of black people he implies probably had it coming anyhow.

God. When this guy was on the street corner with a misspelled sandwich board and a rolled-up pizza box he was using as a megaphone, he was an object of curiosity. Now, instead, he no doubt has a following.

Sometimes I really wish you couldn’t find absolutely everything on the internet.