Did anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg open the proverbial can of worms over the weekend when he told a commencement audience in Texas that Americans are facing “an epidemic of dishonesty,” according to CBS News?
According to the Second Amendment Foundation, any discussion about dishonesty ought to include a look at the gun control lobby, which gets plenty of financial support from the former New York mayor. SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb rattled off several contentious points about the gun prohibition lobby that might be called “accuracy challenged.”
“From deceptively combining suicide and homicide data to inflate what they call the number of ‘gun violence’ victims,” Gottlieb observed in a news release, “to inflating the number of school shootings which the Washington Post called ‘flat wrong,’ and suggesting that raising the age limit for purchasing firearms and banning modern sporting rifles will somehow prevent mass shootings, the gun control campaign has been built on layers of false promises.
“Anti-gun lobbying groups even claimed that 40 percent of gun transactions occurred without a background check,” he added, “until research proved that claim to be bogus.”
The Washington Post even called former President Barack Obama on the 40-percent assertion, giving him “three Pinocchios” for repeatedly using the figure back in 2013.
The same newspaper also called Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy for a claim about the number of school shootings, which was based on report from Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. The number Murphy, and Everytown, stated was “flat wrong,” the story said. The story included this observation:
“Everytown has long inflated its total by including incidents of gunfire that are not really school shootings. Take, for example, what it counts as the year’s first: On the afternoon of Jan. 3, a 31-year-old man who had parked outside a Michigan elementary school called police to say he was armed and suicidal. Several hours later, he killed himself. The school, however, had been closed for seven months. There were no teachers. There were no students.”
In any political debate, especially one as volatile and toxic as gun control versus Second Amendment rights, there is the likelihood that the argument boils down to “he said, he said in reply.” Nobody will agree and cordiality is one of the first casualties.
Bloomberg said something else in his address that caught attention. It was a remark about an ‘alternate reality’ in which the former mayor thinks some people dwell.
“Nothing more accurately reflects an ‘alternate reality’ than the one enjoyed by people like Bloomberg, who live behind walls or gates, and have their own bodyguards,” Gottlieb said.
To his credit, Bloomberg did say that this “epidemic of dishonesty” is “bigger than any one person. It’s bigger than any one party.”
