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Friday, October 5, 2012 Bill Adair Editor, PolitiFact BY EMAIL ONLY Dear Mr. Adair: I
’
m writing on behalf of the National Rifle Association, in response to multiple recent
PolitiFact reviews of NRA statements. We believe PolitiFact’s treatment of our issues shows a
clear pattern of poor reporting and outright bias. PolitiFact has repeatedly rated statements by the NRA and its affiliates as false, based on unsupported assertions from third parties or differences over how to interpret conflicting evidence. Even when PolitiFact ultimately finds truth in our statements, it concedes the point grudgingly. We believe this pattern deserves a comprehensive review for the benefit of the public, and will therefore also publish this letter on our website.
“Medical Misadventure
s
”
vs. Firearm Accidents In 2011, a PolitiFact reporter challenged Marion Hammer
—
a former president of the NRA and current executive director of the NRA-affiliated Unified Sportsmen of Florida (USF)
—
about a USF fact sheet which pointed out that nationwide and in Florida, many more people die
in “medical misadventures” tha
n in firearm accidents. The fact sheet noted that the source of the relevant data was the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). For many years, the NCHS used the term “medical misadventures” to refer
to accidental deaths in the course of medical care, though more recently it has renamed
them as deaths due to “medical care, adverse effects.”
Our research staff guided your reporter to the NCHS data, which indisputably showed that many more people die of medical misadventures than in firearm accidents. Strangely, the reporter continued to express doubt, on the grounds that other sources of data showed that accidental deaths due to medical misadventures were even more numerous than reported by the NCHS. The reporter contacted Robert N. Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC, who
said “I don't think they [NRA and Mrs. Hammer] are off base. I don’
t think they are doing something making an invalid comparison. ... What they are basically doing is looking at the government's underlying cause data. They are not even saying it's a gross underestimate [of
medical misadventures]. They are being very conservative here.”
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Nevertheless, PolitiFact rated the
statement as only “mostly true,” on the grounds
that the individual death certificates upon which the NCHS data are based could undercount those due to medical misadventures, and on the grounds that the USF had only compared medical accidents to firearm accidents, rather than to the aggregate of firearm accidents, suicides, and criminal and self-defense homicides. Neither of these objections has merit. If imperfect medical reports cause medical misadventure deaths to be undercounted by the NCHS, it would mean that such deaths outnumber firearm accident deaths by an even larger margin than asserted in the USF fact sheet.
PolitiFact’s
focus on suicides and homicides was inappropriate, because the USF fact sheet dealt only with accidents in the first place. President Obama and Sarah Brady In 2011, the
Washington Post
reported that Sarah Brady, chairwoman of the pro-gun control Brady Campaign, had claimed that President Obama told her he intended to work for gun
control “under the radar.”
In June of this year, PolitiFact reviewed an NRA campaign mailer that made use of the
President’s reported statement. PolitFact
said our statement
was “pants on fire” false
, mainly because Mrs. Brady now claimed that President Obama never made the comment. But surely the NRA should be free to believe her initial report of the conversation, just as PolitiFact is free to believe her later denial. W
hile we’re on the subject of facts, PolitiFact incorrectly identified
Mrs. Brady as a co-founder of the Brady Campaign. In fact,
“
Brady Campaign
”
is only the newest name of the group, founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns and renamed Handgun Control, Inc. in 1979, before Mrs. Brady became associated with the group. It was only after she became involved with the group that it was renamed
“
Brady Campaign.
”
President Obama’s Appoint
ment of an Anti-Hunting Extremist
In the same mailer, the NRA pointed out the extreme “animal rights” views of Obama’s “regulatory czar,” Prof. Cass Sunstein.
In a 2004 book, Prof. Sunstein said that animals should be able to sue human beings. In a 2007 speech, Sunstein repeated his support for animal lawsuits
and also said “We ought to ban hunting, I suggest, if there isn’t a purpose other than sport or fun.”
Although PolitiFact agreed that Sunstein had made the statements, it rated our account of them
as only “half true,” on the grounds that Su
nstein had apparently changed his tune when his ideas appeared to stand in the way of his Senate confirmation. The supposed change came in a
carefully worded letter that didn’t expressly renounce his earlier views
. But even if it had, why
shouldn’t we
be entitled to believe his initial comments, rather than his later, self-interested denial?
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Obama’s Vote for a Hunting Ammunition
Ban
The same mailer also noted that in 2005, then-Senator Obama voted for legislation introduced by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.,
proposing to redefine “armor piercing ammunition” in a way that would have banned commonplace hunting
rifle ammunition. Though PolitiFact did not explain the details, the legislation would have established a definition
of “armor piercing ammunition”
that would have applied to almost all center-fire rifle ammunition, essentially due to the velocity at which rifle cartridges propel their bullets and the fact that many rifle cartridges can also be fired from handguns. A similar definition was opposed by the Justice Department in the 1980s, for the same reasons.
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PolitiFact rated our statement
“
false,
”
mainly based on a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent
’s
opinion that the ATF would never interpret the proposed law so harshly. But we believe the actual words of the legislation count
for more than one man’s
unsubstantiated opinion, especially given our experience with many situations in which the ATF has interpreted firearms laws more restrictively than a plain reading of the laws would warrant.
Tom Barrett’s
Gun Ban Vote An NRA radio ad during the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election this year pointed out
that the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett, had “voted to ban 15 different kinds of guns, even a lot of common deer rifles.” The statement referred to then
-Congressman
Barrett’s vote for the federal “assault weapon”
ban when it was enacted in 1994. Our staff spent considerable time compiling materials in response to a PolitiFact inquiry on this statement, and explaining the ban to your reporter on the phone and by e-mail. Among the information we provided were several pre-1994 articles describing the rising popularity of semi-automatic rifles targeted by the ban, including their use by hunters in various states. According to your own
Tampa Tribune
, one of those hunters was then-Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles, a ban supporter who admitted that he owned and hunted with a Ruger Mini-14 rifle that
had features that would bring it within the definition of “assault weapon” in the 1994 ban.
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We also sent your reporter testimonials by gun owners concerning their sporting use of other firearms covered by the ban.
Yet your reporter discounted all of the articles, either because they weren’t specific to
Wisconsin
—
a standard the reporter never mentioned to us, and which was irrelevant because the law was a federal ban that applied throughout the United States
—
or because the articles described the rifles as popular for hunting, without specifically mentioning deer. (We had explained to the reporter that any rifle in a caliber suitable for hunting game such as bears or wild hogs can also be used to hunt deer.) Finally, even though the reporter agreed that the term
“common” was
impossible to quantify, he disregarded our documented evidence in favor of
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Armor-Piercing and Exploding Bullets: Hearings on H.R. 2280, H.R. 5392, and H.R. 5437 Before the Subcomm. On Crime of the House Committee on the Judiciary
, 97
th
Cong. 134 (testimony of then-Associate
Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani concerning “the problem posed by ammunition which can be fired interchangeably from handguns and long guns”).
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Vickie Chachere, “Guns 'n politics; Hunting enthusiast Chiles owns type of weapon that's subject to ban,”
Tampa Tribune, May 10, 1994.