Apples and oranges? You bet.
But U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-Twitter) would never let facts get in the way of a self-serving (and far-Left) rhetorical flourish like the one he delivered on Tuesday’s episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program.
“I’m 53 years old, and I’ve seen more Americans die from domestic gun violence than from all of our wars combined…let that sink in,” Booker tweeted following his appearance, paraphrasing his own line and sharing the video clip for good measure:
I’m 53 years old, and I’ve seen more Americans die from domestic gun violence than from all of our wars combined…let that sink in. pic.twitter.com/KI2svCuO0I
— Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) January 25, 2023
What Morning Joe viewers may not know (of course, we could fill a book with what they don’t know) is that Cory Booker has been repeating this same “more dead in my lifetime from guns than all of our wars” line for years. It’s old material!
In fact, The Washington Post (hardly a conservative publication) fact-checked him on it back in 2019 and – to the surprise of some in the Beltway – found it couldn’t rate the claim as true. Why? As of four years ago, WashPo’s Glenn Kessler totaled up 1.66 million U.S. gun deaths versus 1.45 million war dead, but not so fast…
“But there are caveats. The CDC figures are estimates, drawn from a national mortality database, and the CDC says the various databases are not necessarily comparable with one another over time,” Kessler explained. “CDC also counts all deaths from guns, such as murders, justifiable homicides (including what is called “legal intervention” in the databases), accidents and suicides.”
“Let’s look at the distinction between murders and homicides, for instance,” Kessler continued. “In 2017, the CDC estimated 14,542 homicides out of 39,773 gun deaths. By contrast, the FBI counted 11,006 murders via firearms that year. The same trend continues in other years, with the CDC homicide numbers roughly one-third higher than the murders counted by the FBI.”
Even if we use the higher CDC homicide estimate, that would mean only about one-third of gun deaths that years were actually “gun violence” suggesting – over the course of decades – that 1.66 million as of 2019 stat is probably extremely misleading.
So is Booker’s claim true? Or not? Kessler concluded that “while the numbers are technically correct, we’re not sure if it makes sense to tally up deaths across centuries and then compare them to deaths from the last half-century.”
Take everything Spartacus says with a grain of sal.f
