Editor: This is in response to the letter by Paul M. Bowman (the Times June 17) which is some combination of his opinions on Canadian TV news not reporting factually and gun usage in Canada vs. gun usage in America.
Regarding the Canadian 11 p.m. TV news reporting of Donald Trump鈥檚 twitter response to the Orlando nightclub massacre, the news just reported Donald Trump鈥檚 Twitter response.
The news didn鈥檛 鈥榞loss over his tweet鈥� (or tweets) 鈥� they reported them verbatim.
Nothing to do with 鈥榮elf righteous anti-gun propaganda鈥�.
And regarding the comment about radical Islamic terrorism causing the Orlando massacre, it now seems obvious that it was caused by a lone, deranged individual with sexual identity issues.
This individual was a native-born US citizen who legally obtained semi-automatic and automatic firearms, even though he had a background of being watched by the FBI as a possible security risk 鈥� but that鈥檚 a topic for another discussion.
But the most egregious statement Mr. Bowman made in his letter was, quote (just like Donald Trump鈥檚 twitters are quotes) 鈥�...the numbers don鈥檛 lie: We Canadian are six times more likely to be killed by a Canadian gun than Americans are by an American gun.鈥�
What? The latest available yearly statistics for this show that for the year 2013, 131 Canadians were killed by guns, while during the same period, 11,208 Americans were killed by guns.
Factoring in population, American gun deaths were nine times higher than Canadian gun deaths, not six times lower, as Mr. Bowman stated.
Mr. Bowman you are many, many orders of magnitude wrong in your gun death numbers. Where did you learn arithmetic 鈥� from Donald Trump?
As most Canadian TV news programs at least try to do, let鈥檚 get our facts straight.
Grant Lamothe,
Fort 91原创
