Why I say Sarah Brady Lies!

http://hematite.com/dragon/bradylies.html

Mrs. Brady presides over an organization which is trying to make it’s case for severely restricting or prohibiting civilian use of firearms. This involves lots of travel, last minute speech changes and often late nights. So then, one could forgive Mrs. Brady from an occasional slip where she quotes an out of date statistic, or an occasional misstatement of fact. Let’s face it, we’re all only human.

But when I see someone who is in her position, with staff people to research her figures for her, repeatedly use discredited studies, distort the true figures, and misrepresent their true intentions, then I have to believe they are doing it purposefully. The way I was raised, people who purposefully told half-truths, misrepresented themselves or told falsehoods were called liars. I have to put Mrs. Brady into that classification too.

Below are excerpts from one of Mrs. Brady’s speeches to which I’ve added information which tells me that Sarah Brady Lies.

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Excerpts from a speech by Sarah Brady, delivered to general public on October 13, 1994, at the Thompson Conference Center, at the University of Texas, Austin, TX., juxtaposed with other comments Sarah Brady has publicly made.

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“The one thing that I have pushed for has been responsible gun ownership; responsible and keeping guns out of the wrong hands. We are not for disarming people in this nation at all, that is the furthest thing from our minds, but what we are is for saving lives. Now I am known as the Number One Gun Grabber in this country. I don’t want to grab anyone’s guns. I can assure you, but what I do want to do is make things safer.” [emphasis added]

“We must get rid of all the guns.”
–Sarah Brady, speaking on behalf of Handgun Control Inc
Phil Donahue Show, September 1994
— with Sheriff Jay Printz & others
Note: In Texas, just one month later she denies
that she wants to “get rid of all the guns”.

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“I do not believe in extremism; I don’t believe that we should arm every man, woman and child including felons and fugitives in this United States. No, I do not, then again I do not believe we should ban handguns or hunting weapons either. I think that there are extremists on both sides.”

Neither does the U.S. Government. There are already state and federal laws
prohibiting felons, fugitives from justice, the mentally incompetent and those
under 21 from buying or possessing handguns.

Again, note that Mrs. Brady claims she doesn’t want to ban handguns or
hunting weapons, but try to reconcile that with her statement on
the Phil Donahue Show (shown above).

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“…I don’t believe gun owners have rights.”
Sarah Brady, Chairman, Handgun Control, Incorporated, from the Hearst Newspapers Special Report, “Handguns in America” October 1997)

Just remember, Sarah doesn’t consider this view extremist.
I always thought that every person in the U.S. had rights.
That’s what I was taught in school and that’s what the Constitution says and
the courts. I’d never deprive a person of their right to speak their mind, not
even Sarah Brady. But she feels some people don’t deserve to have rights.
Reminds me of a problem that occurred 50 years ago with Germany’s Jews.

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Texans I know also know a lot about gun violence. According to a new report by the Department of Health, Guns are the number one cause of Death to Texans under the age of 44–that is–that is a pretty pathetic. That statistic is applicable to 70% of the population of the state, 70% are under 44.

This is an example of the strange “factoids” that Sarah likes to use. The statement
is limited to those people under 44 years of age. An examination of the Texas Dept.
of Health web site did not reveal such a study, or identify any such statistic. In 1994,
homicide (all causes) ranked 10th (2,144) , with suicide ranking 8th.

So what’s with this “under 44″ statistic? What that eliminates are deaths from things
like heart disease (42,330), cancers (31,959), strokes (9,845), flu & pneumonia (4,039)
and Diabetes (4,582). Note that over 53% of the population died from heart disease
or cancers. Combining both homicides and suicides by firearms (using a very liberal
60% for homicides) more people in Texas died from Diabetes than from firearms.

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“No one can consider themselves immune from the terrible epidemic that claims more than 15 people a day, 15 children a day, excuse me, more than a hundred Americans a day.”

Sarah likes to claim 40,000 people are being gunned down yearly but
she knows full well that deaths from suicide account for nearly half of
that number (about 18,346 in 1994). Without trying to downplay the
tragedy of suicide, no law could adequately prevent someone from taking
their own life. Also, since Canada imposed heavy restrictions on handguns
the suicide rate has remained about the same. People simply changed from
gun suicides to leaping suicides.

But then, one hundred people per day makes for a nice sound-byte, doesn’t it?

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In the first month alone more than 23,000 felons were stopped from buying handguns over the counter, many included murders and rapists and this is according to the ATF.

According to a Government Accounting Office audit, only 12 people
have been prosecuted under the Brady law. The GAO also found that
most of the rejections under Brady were due to errors in filling out the
form or other clerical issues having nothing to do with stopping felons.

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[People] want [a gun] for self protection but have no clue how to use it, how to keep it safely from kids, and in that situation, that gun is 43 times more likely to be misused than it ever is to be used effectively in protecting ones’ self. That statistic comes from the New England Journal of Medicine. It has been researched over the years that a gun in the home is much more a danger to the owner.

Sarah likes to use this “43 times” statistic, even though the author of the
study admits that his study was flawed and, at best, the number should be
closer to 2.7 times. But the true story is in how the study evaluated data.

Remarkably, the author excluded all other legitimate uses, including occasions
where a gun was used a gun for protection but a shot was never fired or a
criminal simply wounded or frightened away. This is equivalent to claiming
airplanes are an public danger due to the number of yearly deaths without
accounting for the number of passengers or miles safely flown!