My father used to say, “If you can’t impress them with intelligence, baffle them with bulls**t.” No, he did not include the asterisks. While he used it more as an accusation than as advice for life, the basic idea behind this, at least in his mind, was that if you spew enough gobbledygook at people, they won’t realize you’re basically trying to pull one over on them.
Earlier this week, I took a shot at Everytown because they’re trying to peddle nonsense. What they’re engaging in is a case of using deliberately manipulated data to try to make a point.
And, as Lee Williams notes at The Gun Writer, they’re also trying to baffle people with BS.
After reading Everytown’s fictitious work: “Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines,” which was recently updated and featured in their sister publication, The Smoking Gun, under a sexy headline: “New Report: Assault Weapons Lead to Surge in Mass Shooting Victims,” it became clear exactly what Everytown is using to regain the public’s trust.
Superscripts!
That’s right.
Superscripts.
Superscripts are tiny little numbers that are used to link academic footnotes, trademarks, supporting stories or other data into a story.
They 567 tend to make any bit of writing 58943 appear much more scholarly 23 and professional when they’re included in the report 99.
And use the superscripts Everytown sure did. There are more than 75 of them in the story.
Many of them link to dead-ends, like “Everytown research” or some other mythical place.
Still, they change the mood of the piece and make the story seem more believable, which is why they’re used.
Exactly.
Most people won’t hover over them in the first place, much less click them, but their presence makes it look like this is a valid academic work, even though it’s not. As Williams notes, many of them are basically self-referential. They forward to Everytown Research, which doesn’t post actual academic research. Their posts are laughable by academic standards, and considering the state of academia these days, that’s absolutely pathetic.
Instead, it’s anti-gun propaganda placed under the Everytown Research heading because it’s meant to lead gullible or malicious journalists into pushing Everytown’s agenda.
For example, in this one, they say that the 10 worst mass shootings since 2016 involved AR-15s and so-called high-capacity magazines. However, as I noted earlier this week, that involves them actively omitting the Virginia Tech and Luby’s Cafeteria shootings, which are among the 10 most deadly attacks in US history, but involved handguns. It’s cherry-picking, and because of the nature of what Everytown does, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason provided for why 2016 needed to be the cut-off time. Theoretically, actual researchers would do so.
But the superscripts aren’t really there because they’re necessary. They’re there to fool people into thinking they’re seeing something that matters, something that’s substantial and that reflects months of work by dedicated researchers who are just seeking the truth, rather than anti-gunners who are looking for nothing more than the latest weapon they can use to attack our civil liberties.
It’s not new, either. It’s what Everytown Research exists to do. We all can see it. We all know it.
Their buddies in the media know it, too. They just don’t care.
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