"Cause" of Injury List to Exaggerate Risks of Firearms

Get ready for gun control supporters bogusly to start claiming that firearms "cause" more injuries than more than 150,000 other factors. The United Nations' World Health Organization is increasing its list of injury causes from 17,000 to 155,000, effective October 1, 2014.

The U.N.'s injury list, which will be used by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is being expanded to include such commonplace mishaps as "Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, initial encounter" and "Toxic effect of contact with other jellyfish, intentional self-harm, initial encounter."

No, we're not making this stuff up. The Weekly Standard covered this story on Monday.

Reconfiguring an international injury data collection system to count the number of people who intentionally sting themselves with jellyfish, and preparing to count the number of interstellar travelers who run into trouble with Earth's gravitational pull is just the kind of nonsense that happens when public health bureaucrats have way too much taxpayer money in their hands without adult supervision. Of course, the United Nations is funded by the taxpayers of various countries, including, as the National Review has noted, $7.7 billion from the United States in 2010.

This brings us to President Obama's executive action last year, asking Congress to appropriate $10 million to be doled out to gun control supporters in the public health field, to conduct "research on the causes and prevention of gun violence." NRA has opposed the use of taxpayer funds for such research, and opposes Obama's $10 million plan, knowing that gun control supporters couldn't care less about the "causes" of violence and use the word "prevention" as a euphemism for "gun control."

On the other hand, if the anti-gun researchers Obama has in mind are willing to hop aboard those crash-landed spaceships once they are up and running, to conduct their research in the next galaxy, $10 million would begin to seem like a extraordinary bargain.

© 2013 National Rifle Association of America. Institute for Legislative Action. This may be reproduced. It may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.