A study published in the American Journal of Medicine last month, shortly after the Navy Yard shooting, found a high correlation between gun deaths and gun ownership in developed countries.
Naturally, this didn't sit too well with the one-track minded conspiracy theory enthusiast Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, who, in an interview with conservative commentator Tom Woods, responded to the study by pulling some new statistics out of the same thing he keeps his head stuffed in.
Pratt first presented the case of the old West, which he claims was actually "under control" and "peaceful" because "virtually everybody was armed."
This might seem laughable to anyone who has ever seen a Western, but to his credit, gun violence was actually lower than it is usually imagined being.
This is because, as explained by law professor Adam Winkler, most old West towns had very strict gun laws.
For a modern example, Pratt cited the murder rate of Great Britain, known for its gun control laws, with that of Pratt's home, Fairfax County, Virginia.
"In Fairfax County, Virginia, where Gun Owners of America is located and where people can obtain a concealed carry permit for a firearm rather easily, and where you've got to assume that there's a whole bunch of folks here in Fairfax County that are armed, we have a murder rate at 1 per 100,000," said Pratt. "Whereas over in peaceful old England, it's 1.7 per 100,000."
Pratt neglected to take into consideration the fact that Fairfax County is the fourth richest county in the entire country, and that the homicide rate for Virginia as a whole is more than twice England's at 3.7 per 100,000.
