John Lennon's Death Was Faked - Yoko Ono's Propaganda Tweets - Dishonest Statisticians Fudging Gun Numbers - Problem of Police Killings and Military Gun Deaths - Violence Is US Government Policy - Purposely Destabilizing and Criminalizing the Poor

Source: Miles Mathis

Yoko Ono's Gun Statistics

by Miles Mathis
added 2/22/13

I used to be a liberal and still am in many ways. I am antiwar, pro-union, anti-corporate, and an environmentalist. By the definitions current at the time of my birth, those factors make me a liberal. In fact, they make me all but a hippie. I have long hair and a beard, and if I smoked the herb I suppose I could lay full claim to the title. I have canvassed for Greenpeace in the (distant) past, and I also worked for the Green Party, helping Ralph Nader beat George W Bush in western Massachusetts in 2000. If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose Democrat or Republican, I would still choose Democrat, based mainly on very old allegiances and hatreds. My mom ran for US Congress as a Democrat, and you never outlive that sort of thing. Last year was the first year I ever registered Republican, and that was only to vote for Ron Paul, who I don't consider to be a Republican. Even the Republicans didn't consider him a Republican, as we can see from the fact that they stole the election from him pretty much in plain sight.

That said, I am thankful no one does have a gun to my head, forcing me to vote Republican or Democrat, since I doubt I ever will again. I have no plan to vote for Rand Paul in 2016, so when I vote it will be third party from here on out. One of the many reasons for that is that I also consider myself a Constitutionalist. Although I don't agree with Ron Paul on a lot of things, I do agree with him concerning limited government. If the government isn't going to be doing good things – and it is clear it is not – then the next best thing is to keep it small, to keep the bad things from running rampant. But it seems to me that both parties have trashed the Constitution, though I don't see how trashing the Constitution can be called either liberal or conservative. I think if we play by the real definitions of the words, trashing a Constitution must be called tyranny. Both parties are now serving tyranny. The so-called left is dead. It has joined the right and both are now supporting a rightist fascism, one that is aggressively pro-war, anti-environment, anti-union, pro-corporate, anti-rights, and anti-Constitution.

One way they both serve tyranny is by a constant stream of lies. We no longer have news or a media, we only have propaganda, 24-7. It is divided into a fake left and a fake right, but it is just two false storylines, sold to you as disinformation. And one of the favorite lies of the tyrants and their mouthpieces is fake statistics. Which brings me to Yoko Ono's gun statistics. Being brought up a liberal, I was brought up to be anti-NRA. I used to believe the propaganda from the left about guns, and that was because I hadn't studied the statistics myself. I just accepted what I was told, because the people that told me seemed to be well-intentioned. I still think many of them are well-intentioned, but intentions don't count for much when you are repeating lies. I always knew the "other guys" (Republicans) were terrible liars, but it took me longer to figure out that "my own people" were just as bad. It may be that the other guys are just as well-intentioned as my people, and that few of them know they are repeating lies, but again, that doesn't count for much. At the end of the day, we have two sets of lies and no truth.

The big lie here is this set of statistics:

31,537 people are killed by guns in the USA every year.

Last year, handguns killed: 48 in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 21 in Sweden, 10,728 in the United States.

The first number is from Ono's recent tweet, and she punctuates the number with a bit of visual propaganda of her own:

Those are supposed to be John Lennon's glasses, which he was wearing when he was shot. That is your first lie.

That's a picture of Lennon signing an album for Chapman several hours before the murder. Chapman is in the background. Even in this hot white light, we can see those glasses are a gold tortoiseshell. They don't match the glasses above. Then there is the problem of the blood. Lennon is said to have been shot in the back. It would be an interesting spray pattern that could spray up and back, defying both gravity and inertia.

But let's study the numbers. As I said, the first number is from Ono's tweet. The other numbers are linked in various other people's tweets. Taken by themselves, these statistics seem unanswerable. From them, you would get the impression the murder rate in the US is about 1,300 times higher than in Great Britain, and that the cause of this is the availability of guns. Is that true?

Well, no. We will start with Ono's number, 31,537. You should already see that there is a big mismatch between that number and the other tweeted number, 10,728. One number is almost three times higher than the other. How can they both be right? My fellow liberals may jump to the conclusion that the second number is just handguns, and that the other 20,000 deaths are due to rifles, shotguns, and machine guns. But that isn't the case. Almost no one is killed by rifles, shotguns, or machine guns. More people are killed by slipping in the bathtub than by rifles, shotguns, and machine guns (assault weapons) combined. More people are killed by lightning each year than are intentionally murdered with rifles.

No, Ono's number is so high because it is padded with suicides, people killed by the police, soldiers killed in training accidents, hunting accidents, and so on. Let us look at them all a bit more closely.

In a given year, about 65% of gun deaths are suicides. You will say, "What difference does that make? If we get rid of guns, people will also stop killing themselves!" I have actually seen that argument made in the press. Is it true? Well, no. Notice that one of the countries mentioned in the statistics above is Japan. Has the lack of guns in Japan lowered the suicide rate? No. Japan has a much higher suicide rate than the US. About 25,000 people kill themselves in Japan every year; they just have to do it with ropes, razor blades, poison, car exhaust, high bridges, and so on. That also applies to Sweden, which has about half again more suicides per capita than the US. Availability of guns has no correlation to suicide prevalence. If people want to kill themselves, they will find a way to do it.

So let's move on to the other subcategory: people killed by police. You may be surprised to know that statistics aren't even kept on that subcategory. The "Justice" Department (and therefore Wikipedia) claims that only around 400 people are killed by justifiable homicide by police each year, but that is based on no data. It is worse than a guess, because it isn't even a good guess. It is little more than a lie. What they should say is that about 400 are reported to them each year, but that since precincts aren't required to report, that number is meaningless. Notice it doesn't even pretend to include "accidents," "justifiable homicide," or "murder." We know from another statistic that about 400 deaths are caused each year by "police misconduct," but we don't know how many of those are caused by guns. We would guess a large percentage. Even so, that number is again based only on what precincts report, and they aren't required to report. Based on known under-reporting, the number of justifiable homicides and misconduct deaths is probably at least 5 to 7 times higher than the reported total of 800, and if we add accidents and actual murders, it may be 10 to 15 times higher or more. We have no way of knowing, but if they are failing to report, you can be sure they are failing to report on purpose. It is the only way they can keep the numbers down. If they all reported diligently, the numbers would probably be shockingly high.

For one example, 54 killings by police were reported in Los Angeles alone in 2012. Do you think the national number is only 7.4 times the number of one city? The population of LA is about 4 million. The population of the US is about 314 million. Doing the math, that would come out to 4,240 police killings nationwide, not 800.

If you think that statistic is an anomaly, let us look at Houston. Houston has a population of about 2 million, and 25 reported police killings in 2012. If we extrapolate from Houston instead of LA, we estimate 3,800 police killings nationwide. The only thing anomalous about the numbers from LA and Houston is that the numbers exist and are close to correct. Try finding any data for most other big cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, etc.

Now, what about gun deaths due to military training accidents? Are those deaths included in the 31,500 number? Yes, if they happen in the US, they are. Since there are about 1.1 million US military personnel stationed in the US, the number of deaths due to guns would not be expected to be small. But again, those numbers are hidden. They aren't required to be kept separately. They are buried in the categories "other accidents" or "all others." If we study the statistics that do exist [see figure 3], we find that about 20% of deaths fall into those categories in any given year. Since the charts include categories for transportation accidents, homicides, heart attacks, and other things, we may assume that a large part of the undefined categories are gun deaths. Even if we are generous, assuming only half of that 20% is gun deaths, we still have 10%. Since the overall rate is 75.1 per 100,000, and about 1.4 million are on active duty, that gives us 1,074. Ten percent of that is 107. If that seems low, it is because it is. The numbers have been fudged again. The military actually pushes its numbers by using a rate per 100,000 person-years of service. What does that mean? It means these dishonest statisticians divide by the average years of service, in order to bring the numbers way down. Since the average term of service is about 10 years, they have fudged the number by an order of ten. Which brings their number 75.1 up to 751, and brings our final number up to 1,074.

So let's return to Yoko Ono's number of 31,500 gun deaths. If we subtract the 20,000 suicides, we are down to 11,500. Around 1,000 of those are accidents – hunting, gun cleaning, etc. So we are down to 10,500. We subtract another 1,100 for military gun deaths, and are down to 9,500. Now, what the mainstream does at this point is subtract 400 for police deaths and give the rest to murders. But we have just seen what a cheat that is. Not only do they fail to report and count up all the people killed by police, they then have the nerve to just scoot all those people into another column. They simply remove several thousand out of the "killed by police" column, and put them in the "murdered" column.

If instead we subtract the police killings, we are down to below 6,000. We have lowered Ono's number from 31,500 to 6,000 (and lowered her 32-year number from 1 million to 193 thousand).

That still sounds high compared to other countries, but you have to remember they are comparing the US to countries like Switzerland, which has a population of only 8 million. Just from that, we would expect the US statistic on just about anything to be 38 times higher.

And what they don't tell you is that Switzerland has a lot of civilian guns. Instead of a standing army, Switzerland has a "people's militia." What is that? It means that most households have guns, and many households are required to have guns. Switzerland has more guns per person than any other country besides the US, so the lower gun deaths in Switzerland must be caused by some other factor. We will look at what that might be in a moment.

But first, I want to look at murder statistics. When the mainstream starts talking about "gun deaths," what most people think is "murder." It is not how people are being killed that matters, it is how many, and why. If we got rid of all guns and our murder rate went up, I don't think many people would consider that a great victory, whether they thought of themselves as liberals or conservatives. I doubt that many "well-intentioned" liberals would say, "I am really bothered by gun deaths, but it is OK if people are murdering each other with baseball bats, kitchen knives, and anthrax." It is the murders that should concern us, and if we wish to consider murders, we should look at murder statistics, not these padded and inflated and pushed "gun deaths." And if we do that, we get a completely different picture. If we look at murder statistics worldwide, we find that the US rate is indeed somewhat higher than Western Europe's, but not 1,000 times higher – as those ridiculous statistics of Yoko Ono above implied. If we go to the United Nations' own statistics, we find that the US has about 2-3 times the murder rate of Portugal or Poland or Canada, and 3-4 times the rate of Spain or Sweden.

Problem is, those numbers are still heavily skewed by the police and military problem we looked at above. The US numbers that the United Nations uses are inflated by police killings and military gun deaths. Remember, the dishonest US statisticians simply transfer police killings into the "murdered" column. They want to hide a large percentage of those killed by police, so they just move them into the other category. They do the same thing with military deaths. They don't even have to move them, they just fail to subtract them. Since US police kill far more people than European police, and since the US military is far larger than other militaries, this skews the comparison greatly. If we do the math right, it ends up bringing the US murder rate to within the same range as the European rate. Not 1,300 times higher, but about the same. These dishonest statisticians quoted by Yoko Ono and the tweeters have managed to push the numbers by a factor of over 1,300! As I have just shown you, to do that they need a whole fleet of pushes, all added together.

It is also worth noting that the murder rate in the US is admitted to be about 1/3rd that of Russia, 1/6th that of South Africa, and 1/9th that of Jamaica. Jamaica has strict gun control, but a murder rate 9 times higher than the US.

Which brings us to the real difference between the US and Europe. Assuming that the big cities of the US do have a higher murder rate than some cities in Western Europe, we should look at the reasons why. As we know from the examples of Switzerland and Jamaica, it isn't due to gun control. It is due to US policy. A logical person would study the link between policy on violence in the US and prison policy in the US. Why? Because they are causally linked. Violence leads to prosecution which leads to prison. And the police are a link here as well. The police departments stock the prisons, don't they? Well, the US leads the world in prison population. We have more people in prison per capita than Russia, China, Singapore, Turkey, South Africa, and Thailand. A lot more. One in 100 US adults is in prison. Part of it is profit: prisons are profitable. But it is even worse than that. It isn't just profit, it is policy. This is how we have chosen to deal with our poor (especially if they are black, Hispanic, Native American, or hippie). The US government has been waging a covert and overt war against these groups at least since the 1960s. This is known. It isn't a conspiracy theory. The US government admits that big programs were already in place in the 1960s to discredit and destroy all these groups, and to dismantle any political power they might possess. See COINTELPRO and CHAOS, which are partly declassified. Those programs weren't ended in the '70s: they were expanded decade by decade, and they have been very successful. This is how the left was infiltrated and co-opted over half a century.

I mentioned numbers from Los Angeles above. Well, the violence in LA is not an accident. It is government policy. Those running the show at both the federal and state level want a war with Hispanics, blacks, hippies, anti-war protesters, and anyone else not prostrate before the military–industrial complex. Nixon and Hoover (and Governor Reagan) admitted that back in 1969, in now declassified documents. Reagan admitted it on TV: remember his quote, "No more appeasement. If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with."? They started the war on purpose, and even went so far as to arm and drug the opposition. Why would they do this? Because they knew it was a war they were sure to win.

We see evidence of this not only from COINTELPRO and CHAOS in the '60s and early '70s; we see it from the crack epidemic purposely imported by the government in the 1980s, in order to further destabilize and criminalize the poor. This is also not a conspiracy theory. Gary Webb documented it in a book called Dark Alliance, which the CIA has never even bothered to debunk. Suppress the book, yes; murder Webb, yes; address the claims in the book, no. The CIA took over large parts of the drug trade for many reasons: 1) to finance their projects without having to go to Congress (this was proved in Iran–Contra testimony and is part of the Congressional record), 2) to further destabilize already marginalized black and Hispanic and hippie populations, 3) to seed the newly privatized prison system, sending it thousands of new inmates snared with drugs and arms they had been recently supplied with. As far as number three goes, we find the timelines match exactly, since the US inmate population began to swell at precisely the same time these projects peaked. The huge increase in prison population has not been an accident or an outcome of more bad people. It has been policy – the desired outcome. We are basically incarcerating the poor on purpose, for profit. Welfare and soup kitchens and food stamps don't make anyone rich, but prisons do. If you create a prison, you have slipped a private interest in between the poor person and the government, and the government then must pay the private interest to take care of the poor person. Plus, prisons cost a lot more than soup kitchens and shelters. Many decades ago, entrepreneurs came up with the brilliant idea of incarcerating the poor for profit. But to do that, they had to get poor people to commit more crimes. Why not supply them with guns and drugs for low prices? Pretty soon most of them are bound to get into some kind of trouble. And that is what has happened.

You will ask what any of this has to do with gun deaths. Everything. If you supply poor people with cheap drugs and guns, and then instruct the police and the courts to crack down viciously on every minor infraction, of course you are going to have chaos. Besides having the most prison inmates, the US also has the most draconian sentencing. What Europe finds even stranger and more backward than our love of guns is our love of extremely long prison sentences. We have many people serving life sentences for relatively minor crimes. If you steal a candy bar at knifepoint on three separate occasions, you may get a life sentence courtesy of the infamous three strikes program, even if you never once use the knife. Many people have spent decades in jail for doing nothing but using drugs.

These ridiculous (often mandatory) prison sentences of course cause desperation in anyone caught or about to be caught by police – as they are meant to. Rather than get beat up by the police and spend 20 years in jail being tortured by guards and fellow inmates, many think, "Why not go out in a blaze of glory?" And so we see people being killed. We see people killing police, and even more we see police killing people, often for almost nothing. And again, this isn't an accident. It isn't civilization unwinding. It is civilization being unwound on purpose by the government itself. It is policy. It is the rich preying on the poor in ever more novel and inhumane ways.

And it is policy that "well-intentioned liberals" have chosen to overlook. Democrats had a mandate with both Clinton in the 1990s and with Obama more recently, and they did nothing about this and a thousand other things. If the Democrats were still liberal by any meaning of the word, they would have passed legislation against prisons for profit, CIA drug-running, torture, cruel and unusual punishment, long sentences, and police brutality. They would have required reporting of police killings of all sorts. They would have required the keeping of real statistics by everyone, including the military. They would have mandated sentencing for police caught mistreating prisoners. And they would keep the military out of policing, as per the Posse Comitatus Act. Instead, the Democratic Party has become a second Republican Party, a cabal of fascists whose only concern is making money. If they have to do this through military contracts, biotech contracts, raping the environment, drugging kids, and burying their heads, so be it. It is all part of the modern world, and "There is no going back."

Which is why Yoko Ono's tweets mean less than nothing to me. She appears to be just one more horrible person who has caved to the new world order and the propaganda machine. No doubt she was paid well for her tweet, and she didn't even have to stand around while they sprayed the new glasses with fake blood and took pictures. Her whole life has been manufactured by the matrix, so why should she see any problem in using her husband's death to promote the desired legislation of the new Nazis? Those who would listen to any tweet of Ono, considering her to be a source of accurate information, are probably already too lost to save. But for those still teetering on some fence somewhere, this paper is for you. Look closer. Do a little math. To be truly liberal is not to be for gun control. It is to be for government control. Liberal means "free," and you will never be free again until you stop this all-devouring government one way or another.

Further reading:

Proof John Lennon's Death Was Faked (by Miles Mathis, added 8/3/14)

Yoko Ono Tweets to Piers Morgan

Yoko Ono Pushes for Gun Control

Who Is Behind Gun Control in America?

Jews Lead Gun Control Charge

Jewish Neocons Behind the ADL, DHS and the U.S. Presidency

Warren Buffett - ''There's Class Warfare, But It's the Rich Class
Making War, and We're Winning''

Gil Scott-Heron - "B" Movie

The Clash - The Guns of Brixton


Lou Reed - Men of Good Fortune

John Lennon - Working Class Hero

Yoko Ono - Walking on Thin Ice

"Mark Staycer" – or John Lennon?