Jim Carrey used to be a comedian and a beloved actor. Now he spends his days drawing horrifying images and tweeting about his hate for Republicans.
On Wednesday, Carrey tweeted a drawing of a three-fingered hand holding a bloody hundred-dollar bill next to a candle.
“10,000 gun deaths in 2019 and the year is far from over. What Osama bin Laden did to us was terrible but he doesn’t hold a candle to Mitch McConnell,” Carrey wrote when tweeting out the drawing.
The Washington Times reported that McConnell’s presence in the senate has had no effect on gun-related deaths in the United States. “In 1983, the year before Mr. McConnell was first elected to the U.S. Senate, there were more than 31,000 gun deaths in the U.S., the outlet reported.”
In 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 39,773 total gun deaths. That year had the highest total gun deaths since 1968, the earliest years for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has data. The Pew Research Center looked into the numbers in August:
This was slightly more than the 39,595 gun deaths recorded in the prior peak year of 1993. Both gun murders and gun suicides have gone up in recent years: The number of gun murders rose 32% between 2014 and 2017, while the number of gun suicides rose each year between 2006 and 2017 (a 41% increase overall).
Gun suicides reached their highest recorded level in 2017. But the number of gun murders remained far below the peak in 1993, when there were 18,253 gun homicides – and when overall violent crime levels in the U.S. were much higher than they are today.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was the Senate Majority Leader in 2017, but he was not in that position in 1993. That position was held by Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-ME) that year and in the years preceding.
Further, the high number of gun deaths in 2017 does not include a look at the country’s population. Pew reported that the rate of gun deaths in 2017 was 12 per 100,000, “the highest rate in more than two decades, but still well below the 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974, the highest rate in the CDC’s online database.”
The majority of gun-related deaths involve suicides. There is some research to suggest that a lack of access to a gun would prevent many of these suicides, but there is also the possibility that a person intent on harming themselves would not stop because they didn’t have a gun.
What all these numbers show, however, is that gun-related deaths are not tied to any politician or party. Further, the “common sense” gun control solutions politicians and celebrities like Carrey support would do nothing to stop any of the mass shootings constantly exploited by the media, nor would new laws stop criminals who already intend to break laws by committing such crimes.