Comments on: Anatomy of a Zombie Lie…

By: LIES « Empire Of The Senseless

LIES « Empire Of The Senseless — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 19:34:39 +0000

[...] This number has been repeated by the courtier and rightwing press so often that it is taken as true, even though it is not. [...]

By: LarryE

LarryE — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 22:05:37 +0000

Also here via the Roundup. Thank you for this.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:00:07 +0000

Jon’s a gentleman, much missed.

Thanks for reading.

By: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Recommended Reading (Bloggerific Edition)

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:51:11 +0000

[...] does not seem to be a Balloon Juice entry — although Tom Levenson did send in a link for his Inverse Square blog. So did a bunch of BJ commentors who have their own blogs, including WereBear, Mustang Bobby, [...]

By: fnerb

fnerb — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 05:49:29 +0000

Jon sent me…

Lovely stuff. I hadn’t seen the numbers or their sources – shamefully, I heard who it was from and promptly ignored it – but now it’s making more sense. Thanks for it!

By: Andrew W.

Andrew W. — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:49:23 +0000

Tom, you’ve overlooked one obvious explanation for many of these statistics: criminals target gun-owners.

Everyone looks for that higher mountain to climb. You can only break into empty houses so many times before it stops being fun. At some point you have to say to yourself, “It’s time to rob that house with the Marine Corps flag outside.”

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 03:45:20 +0000

Thanks for the debunking. Some folks live in fantasy land. Can you imagine the body count if even a handful of people at the latest massacre had pulled out their guns and started shooting? For good reasons you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater, and you shouldn’t even think about firing a gun. Of course, a lot of folks are “heroes in their own mind” and lead all too rich fantasy lives.

On the other hand, guns actually can deter criminals. We had a couple of home invasions recently. One home owner in the neighborhood fired at the miscreants when they tried to break in. He injured one of them. They were caught when one of them started bragging about his gunshot wound. Our local criminals aren’t exactly Lex Luthor types.

By: AJ Hill

AJ Hill — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:44:45 +0000

A telephone survey (http://vacps.org/public-policy/the-contradictions-of-kleck) using self-report methods identical to those employed by the study you’ve debunked, “proved” that 2.5 million Americans have had close personal encounters with aliens from outer space. I’m more inclined to believe it than the gun report; but, but in fact they’re both meretricious nonsense. The primary difference is that the claim about close encounters is harmless, while the claim about guns is grotesquely pernicious.