this good news of a safer America under the well used cone of silence.

Our duty to constantly out both lies and misinformation that fascists will die without.

Not to mention there must have been many more police officers when fatalities were the highest.

how can it be true that "most police officers never fire their weapon in a lifetime of being a police officer" ?

When it suits you, you use statistics. You use historical data. You contextualize each incident to show that while not great, it's not nearly as bad.

When it suits you, you merely say how outrageous that X number of incidents happen each year. You make sure that people see all the details of that event after you've spun the details to make your point. They're primed; they see what you tell them they'll see, they focus on what you've said is important.

Deaths plummet over the course of decades and the frequency of something happening is really quite low, by pointing out specific examples, possibly every single example for the year, you can convince people that something is widespread and an increasing problem. Even if the incidence goes down from 20 to 18 in a population of many, many millions. And if something happens like, "You know, this is really the context" and data take the wind out of your rhetorical sails, then you come back and say that the data you just used is corrupt and can't be used. Thus letting the first conclusion, your own, levitate without support.


My take? It's hard for the guy any one guy playing in a poker game to complain that the other players are more corrupt because they--gasp--have cards in their hands. Esp. when the player doing the complaining's been on a roll.