CSGV anti-gun spin machine in full gear

One of the "features" on the homepage of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) (the only organization I know of to openly call for a government monopoly on force) is the inclusion every day of a couple links to mainstream media articles about guns, gun laws, shooting deaths, etc. CSGV, though, is often not happy with what they apparently perceive to be an insufficiently anti-gun slant in the headlines--so they simply make up their own.

Today, one of CSGV's headlines is "Innocent Shot Woman Latest of 400 Serious Hunting Accidents in Virginia."

(Click to enlarge)

The real headline, though, is somewhat different--"Ferrum student's death unusual: Accidents rarely involve nonhunters"

I guess we know now what makes the victim "innocent"--as a non-hunter, she was not "guilty" of hunting.

The real headline makes clear that the entire thrust of the story is the unusual nature of a fatal hunting accident in which the victim was not a hunter, but that's very clearly not what CSGV wants to talk about.

Actually reading the article clears up some other points the CSGV would probably prefer remain fuzzy. Right from the beginning, we have:

There have been nearly 400 serious hunting-related accidents in Virginia since 1998 . . .

The CSGV zeroed right in on that "400" number, without mentioning that we're talking about over a decade's worth of accidents in Virginia (a state in which there is a lot of hunting).

The article doesn't make clear the criteria by which an accident is judged to be "serious," but this passage might shed some light.

Of 39 firearms-related hunting fatalities in Virginia since 1998, none involved a nonhunter, according to Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries spokeswoman Julia Dixon.

So in that time period of more than a decade, fewer than 10% of the 400 serious accidents were shooting fatalities. Granted, as a paraplegic, I'm well aware that non-fatal injuries can be quite serious, but I think it quite reasonable to assume that the victims of many of the "serious" accidents eventually recovered fully.

Note also that serious hunting accidents do not necessarily involve gunfire, as the article makes clear.

The game department's accident data include firearms-related incidents and serious tree-stand falls.

I can attest to the potential seriousness of a fall from a tree stand--when I did my inpatient physical therapy following the car accident that put me in a wheelchair, one of my fellow patients was a paraplegic whose condition stemmed from such a fall. I suspect that the "400" number also includes bowhunting accidents.

I am not trying to minimize the tragedy of the death of the woman, or excuse the idiocy of the hunter who shot her because he thought she was a deer, and fired without verifying his target, but there simply is not an epidemic of fatal hunting accidents via gunfire, as the CSGV would seem to have us believe.