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The U.S. Justice Department announced in mid-1998 that background checks mandated by the Brady Bill had prevented 69,000 people from buying guns during 1997. President Clinton extrapolated from these figures later that day that "law enforcement officals have stopped hundreds of thousands of felons, fugitives and stalkers from buying handguns every year. Actually, about half of rejections under the Brady Bill were due to paperwork problems or traffic violations, not violent criminal offenses. A Clinton spokesperson later explained the discrepancy as "an editing error." Reagan would have had himself photographed participating in a gun buyback program on the day of the Justice Department announcement rather than making such a speech, and he would not had to explain a discrepancy later.
Statistics can be magical, even miraculous. With the help of finely-tuned statistical analysis, the average American with thirty years of driving experience has been killed or almost killed over 100 times.
Guns in the home are 43 times as likely to kill a family member or friend than an intruder, according to one study conducted in Seattle. That's true, but throw in the facts that intruders are only killed one to two percent of the time they're confronted by armed residents, that the majority of the "43 times as likely" numbers are suicides, and that many nations with fewer handguns have higher suicide rates than the United States because people can find other ways to kill themselves, and the initial statistic becomes a much less dramatic rallying point for gun control.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced in the late '90s that it had only a .5% escape rate for prisoners on furlough, arriving at that figure logically by dividing 428 escapes by 121,713 furloughs. That's great, but there were only 10,835 inmates involved in the furlough program, so the real escape rate was more like one in 25.
Depressed by the factoid that nearly 100 million Americans have chronic diseases or disabilities? Well, 32 million of those afflicted are suffering sinusitis and hay fever.
The year Atlanta hosted the Olympics, the city's crime rate dropped dramatically, in large part because they generated statistics favoring tourism. If they didn't quite go so far as to reclassify "burglary" as "vandalism to doorknobs," they came pretty close to it, and some of the officials who had been involved in generating those statistics were discharged after an Atlanta Constitution expose.
Oh yes, and the government learns how to generate, interpret and disseminate statistics from the private sector. Watch those numbers, and don't drown in a lake with an average depth of four feet.