Penny Starr wrote in a Jan. 14 CNSNews.com article:
A Department of Justice (DOJ) report on “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008,” indicates that Americans under 18 are more than 3.5 times more likely to be murdered by poisoning than by a gun shot.
Americans under 18 are also 3.4 times more likely to be murdered by arson than by a gun.
The data show that of all Americans under 18 who were murdered between 1980 and 2008, 28.6 percent were poisoned, 27.9 percent were killed by arson, and 8.1 percent were killed with a gun.
The data also show that between 1980 and 2008, 17.9 percent of the murders of Americans under 18 were in multiple homicides.
But Starr misread the chart in the DOJ report. Here’s the relevant information:
The second column of numbers denotes victims under 18. While Starr apparently read the numbers vertically, they’re supposed to be read horizontally. The chart does not say that 28.6 percent of murdered children were killed with poison, it says that 28.6 percent of the people murdered by poison were children.
CNS made Starr’s article quietly disappear without explanation or apology, making this the second article in the past 24 hours CNS has had to remove for false or questionable claims. Starr’s article, meanwhile, is still in Google cache, and a screenshot of the erroneous article is below.
