Aftab Pureval Retweets Cincinnati Mayor’s False Claim About Gun Violence Based on Bogus Data

Aftab Pureval

The blood had not even been cleaned from the sidewalks Thursday when Cincinnati’s Democrat Mayor John Cranley tried to score political points for his party’s anti-gun agenda.

Puerto Rico-born Omar Enrique Santa-Perez, 29, had just slaughtered three innocent people and gravely injured two others before being shot dead by police shortly after 9 a.m. at the Fifth-Third Bank off Fountain Square downtown.

Cranley, in an interview just minutes after the scene of the chaos and mayhem caused by Perez had been cleared, channeled former President Obama’s comments about mass shootings being unique to the United States.

“This is not normal, and it shouldn’t be viewed as normal. No other industrialized nation in the world has this level of active shooter situations on a regular basis. There’s something deeply sick at work here, and we as a country have to deal with it. At any given time at any place in this country, people are engaged in these active shootings, which is grotesque. In my opinion, all options need to be on the table.”

Cranley tweeted a similar comment, which was then retreated by Aftab Pureval, the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts who is running for Congress in the district that includes Cincinnati.

Pureval, a Democrat, is running against incumbent Steve Chabot (R-OH-1) and was apparently one block from the Fifth-Third Center when the shooting happened.

Cranley and Pureval are merely channeling the bogus rhetoric of their leader, Barack Obama, whose speeches were never fact-checked by the major corporate media.

In January 2016, Obama claimed:  “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn’t happen in other countries.

Watch him here:

While it may sound plausible to the unenlightened ear, Obama’s comments about the U.S. being uniquely overrun by mass shooters, echoed by Democrat mayors like Cranley, just don’t pass the accuracy test.

Any reputable study on shooting deaths compared by nation must take into account the size of each country’s population. Obviously, all other things being equal, the U.S. is going to have more shootings than Macedonia or France, because the U.S. dwarfs those countries in terms of its population.

While the US has been experiencing a concerning rise in shooting deaths in the last six years – it had actually been falling for many years before that – the number of shooting deaths is still not outside the norm when compared to industrialized Europe. In fact, the U.S. does not even rank in the world’s top 10 nations for such shootings, according to a study by the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center.

In a study that looked at mass shootings of four or more victims worldwide from 2009 to 2015, the U.S. placed 11th with a death rate of 0.089 per million. Several countries in Europe had a higher death rate from mass shootings, including Norway at 1.88 deaths per million; Serbia at 0.381, France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, Albania at 0.206, followed by Slovakia, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic.

There were also 27 percent more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

“There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

“But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.”

Of course the insinuation of Democrats whenever they make such statements is that “common sense” gun-control laws would have prevented the shooting of the moment and saved lives.

The definition of “common sense” depends on who you ask, but tops on the list is always a call for universal background checks for all gun transfers, even so-called “loaner” guns passed between family members and friends. This would essentially establish a national gun registry able to track the movement of all guns.

Many will also agree that all semi-automatic rifles that can hold more than three or four rounds of ammunition should be banned, as well as all “high capacity” clips or magazines. This would bring the United States into the same real as Europe, but as the data shows it would not necessarily lower the amount of people being shot to death by criminals.

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Anthony Accardi is a writer and reporter for The Ohio Star.

 

 

 

 

 

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  1. […] retweeted Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley’s tweet, which The Ohio Star previously reported was based on false data about mass shootings in […]

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