What are a few dozen bogus percentage points when I'm trying to get important gun legislation passed?
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, by whose efforts the ban on firearms in national parks was lifted in 2010, this week
sought unsuccessfully to expand the repeal to land under the control of the Army Corps of Engineers. Coburn's rider to the Water Resources Development Act failed to get the needed 60 votes. He subsequently pulled another rider that would have required the federal government to tally all the guns and ammunition in its possession.
During the debate on his proposal, Coburn said the end of ban on guns in national parks had reduced crime. But on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Thursday, he was much more specific:
“Remember, in 2010, everybody said you can’t dare let guns go into the national parks. And of course the rapes, murders, robberies and assaults are down about 85 percent since we did that.”
Both Glenn Kessler at the
Washington Post's Fact Checker and PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter pointed out just how far off Coburn was.
John Hart, communications director for Coburn, said the senator "misspoke." Comparing the crime rate for 2011, the last year for which data is available with 2008 yields a “percentage decline [that] is closer to 12 percent,” Hart said.
But that, too, is cherry-picking. And don't you just love the time-honored "misspoke"? As if Coburn's claim was a slip of the tongue instead of a fork. Even the revised percentage is bogus, however.
As Kessler points out, a comparison of 2011 statistics with the five-year average before 2011 shows a 10 percent drop. But a comparison with 2009, the best year of those five, and also the year before the repeal of the gun ban went into effect, shows a five percent increase. Indeed, Coburn's choice of 2008, when the violent crime statistics were higher than in 2009, seems specifically chosen to make the effects of the post-repeal ban look better than they actually are.
There is also the little matter that violent crime was already down in national parks before the gun ban repeal, just as it has been across the nation.
When it comes to murders and non-negligent manslaughter in national parks, however, the numbers (from a very low base) rose. There were five in 2008 and three in 2009. In 2010, there were 15 and in 2011 there were seven. Using Coburn's preferred start-date of 2008, that's a 40 percent increase. A rise, of course, that doesn't quite fit into Coburn's narrative.