On the list of things that will kill ya, turns out AR15s aren’t all that high up.
ABC News Accidently Admits AR-15s Aren’t as Dangerous as the Dems Pretend They Are
In their latest hit piece on Long Island’s GOP Rep. George Santos, ABC News let a little fact slip about the AR-15.Santos co-sponsored a bill to name the AR-15 the “national gun of the United States.” ABC News stroked an article about voters protesters showing up at Santos’s office to protest the bill.
The ABC article states, “Research shows an AR-15-style rifle has been used to kill at least 226 people in mass shootings since 2012.”
If my calculator is accurate, that’s roughly 22.6 people per year, or 1.8 people per month, who have been killed by AR-15s in mass shootings.
Perspective
Let’s take a look at ways in which more Americans die every year than by AR-15s used in mass shootings:
- Twenty-eight people are killed every year by lightning.
- Roughly 2,167 Americans die annually from constipation.
- On average, 951 people are killed by their lawnmowers while another 4,193 are killed by farm tractors and other agricultural equipment.
- Murderous toasters kill 45 people per year.
- Eleven teenagers die every day while texting and driving.
- An estimated 40 people die every year while skateboarding.
- Roughly 10,206 are accidentally strangled to death while they sleep, and for those who survive the night, another 10,386 will die every year falling out of bed.
- As per the FBI, rifles of every variation — including but not limited to the scary AR-15 — killed 215 Americans in 2019. But another 1,533 were killed by knives, and 651 people were beaten to death by hands, fists, feet, etc.
- In 2015, 5,051 people choked to death while eating.
- Americans average 62 deaths per year by bees, wasps, and hornets.
What Have We Learned?
We’ve learned that if you want to cut down on needless deaths, you’re better off handing out prune juice than trying to purloin AR-15s, as we Americans are roughly 10 times more likely to die as Elvis did — on the toilet — than by an AR-15 in a mass shooting. We’re 50 times more likely to be beaten to death. We’re roughly 1,000 times more likely to be killed — either by accidental strangulation or falling — from our beds than by an AR-15.
“As Elvis did.” Sigh. I tire of having to point it out again and again, but the truth is Elvis did NOT “die on the toilet.” That story was manufactured by Vernon for a press conference in the immediate wake of The King’s demise. Being an old-school sort of backcountry coot, Papa Vern considered it much more of an embarrassment and a disgrace that his son might have died from lethal-level amounts of at least five different drugs coursing through his system than of a heart attack induced by straining unproductively on the crapper, and assumed most ordinary folks would feel the same way as he did about it.
As recounted in the second volume of Peter Guralnick’s masterful Elvis bio, Careless Love, the master bathroom at Graceland, see, had a separate-but-attached ante-room with a comfy sofa and a LaZBoy recliner therein. And that’s where Elvis was actually found crumpled dead on the floor, fully clothed in his silken jammies, with a magazine in hand. Elvis had for years been known to sit in the master-bath lounge area reading at any hour of the day or night, just relaxing, so it’s no big surprise that it might be where he expired.
Vernon’s grim fairy tale, intended to preserve some shred of dignity for his son after his death, actually had quite the opposite effect, having lingered on to haunt E’s memory as a topic of disdain and mockery ever since. Funny how our attitudes and assumptions have so radically shifted since Vernon Presley’s day, innit? Would that hoplophobic shitlibs’ knee-jerk loathing for the venerable AR15 might someday undergo a similar shift, I’m thinkin’.
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I was not aware of that Elvis vignette. Thanks for that.