Misleading use of data

The basic premise of the article is that the following sentence, which appears in a statement issued by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is a "remarkably transparent" lie: "More [police] officers are killed with firearms than through any other single cause." Mr. Workman goes to great lengths to "prove" that the sentence is a lie by presenting statistics that show that over the past ten years, and in each of those years, the number of police officers fatally shot accounted for less than half of police officer fatalities.

The statistics on which Mr. Workman relies can be found in the table, which appears on the web site of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

The table shows that of the 1,649 police officers killed during the ten year period, 582 were shot. Being shot was the single largest cause of police officer deaths during the period. The second largest cause, with 478 deaths, was auto accidents. The third largest cause, with 151 deaths, was being struck by a vehicle. As the Brady Campaign correctly claimed, during the ten year period more police officers were killed by firearms -- by being shot -- than were killed by any other single cause. Furthermore, more police officers were killed by firearms than by any other single cause in eight out of the ten years covered. Mr. Workman says, "Do the math," but all you need to do is read the numbers in the table. (You might also want to consider that 582 police officers shot to death is an awful lot of dead cops, regardless of where death by gunshot ranks in comparison to other causes of death in the line of duty.)

Mr. Workman either is too stupid to understand, or thinks that newspaper readers like you are too stupid to understand, the difference between more than any other single cause and more than all other causes combined. The Brady Campaign does not say anywhere that more police officers were shot to death than were killed by all other causes combined.

Mr. Workman accuses the Brady Campaign of trying to win support for an assault weapons ban with an effort that "is founded on falsehood and hysteria, designed to fool and alarm people into supporting a political agenda that ultimately would legislate gun ownership out of existence." He adds that, "The gun ban crowd . . . hates guns and ultimately wants them all banned. Their misleading use of data to accomplish this should tell us all we need to know about the nobleness of their cause."

Mr. Workman presents no evidence that the political agenda that he attributes to the "gun ban crowd" exists anywhere other than in his own propaganda. His "evidence" that the Brady Campaign is founded on falsehood and the misleading use of data proves the exact opposite, namely that the Brady Campaign's position is fully supported by the data on which Mr. Workman relies.

So, who is guilty of disseminating falsehoods? Who is guilty of the misleading use of data? Who is trying to fool and alarm people? Why, that would be none other than Dave Workman, who apparently believes that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick, but who apparently is too stupid to realize that when a strong wind is blowing directly at you and you throw your mud directly into that wind, where much of the mud will stick is all over you.

By publishing Mr. Workman's exercise in creative mud distribution, the York Sunday News has itself been rather thoroughly splattered with mud. The newspaper's editors owe its readers an explanation of how and why Mr. Workman's article came to be published.

Edward Waxman
Springettsbury Township