(Beth Clifton collage)
Promotions & defenses of the AR-15 and pit bulls are among “America’s big lies”
WASHINGTON D.C.; KANAB, Utah––An AR-15, as the world knows now, dubbed “America’s rifle,” was on May 24, 2022 used yet again to massacre Americans, this time 19 fourth graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
(See Hours after Uvalde school killings, Iowa lawmakers authorize AR-15 deer hunt.)
Earlier in 2022, pit bulls, “America’s dog,” as designated by the Best Friends Animal Society, killed at least a dozen Americans and perhaps as many as 17, depending on how “pit bull” is defined––five each in April and May alone.
(Beth Clifton collage)
AR-15 & pit bull mayhem compared
“Americans now own an estimated 15 million AR-15s,” reported John Schuppe for the NBC News segment America’s rifle: Why so many people love the AR-15.
Americans now own about 4.2 million pit bulls, according to the annual ANIMALS 24-7 surveys of dogs offered for sale or adoption.
(See Dog breed census 2021: Labs, hounds top list; pit bulls come in third.)
(Beth Clifton collage)
The 15 million AR-15 “America’s rifles” appear to have been used in an average of about 350 murders per year since 2020: approximately one per 42,857 of the guns.
The 4.2 million “America’s dogs,” or pit bulls, have killed an average of 40 Americans and Canadians per year, disfiguring 270 at levels high 4 and 5 on the Ian Dunbar scale of dog attack severity.
That works out to about one death or disfigurement per 13,548 pit bull-type dogs, not counting Cane Corsos, Presa Canarios, bullmastiffs, and other closely related lookalikes.
Those statistics signify that “America’s dogs” are about three times as dangerous as “America’s rifles,” probably because “America’s rifles” cannot pull their own triggers.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Active shooters” vs. sound asleep
Using “America’s rifle” to kill classrooms of children, theaters of movie-goers, crowds at a concert, and so forth requires the participation of an “active shooter,” as the FBI calls gun-using mass murderers.
“America’s dog,” by comparison, often kills people while their owners are sound asleep. And about a third of the “America’s dog” victims are their owners, or other members of their household.
(See Will there be a Tomb of the Unknown Pit Bull Victim? Body count 2021
How did AR-15s & pit bulls get to be “America’s” anything?
Why are “America’s rifle” and “America’s dog,” so-called, among the most dangerous common possessions of Americans?
Who called them that, and why?
Were Americans, other than gun owners and pit bull advocates, ever polled on the matter?
The story begins in 1851, and demonstrates that from the very beginning, calling anything “America’s” has been introduced, with mercenary ambitions, chiefly to disguise the origins and nature of whatever is so designated.
The New York Yacht Club, founded by John Cox Stevens and eight friends in 1844, initially existed to win prize and gambling money for the founders in races against other clubs.
The most lucrative yachting event of the era was the One Hundred Sovereign Cup, a race around the Isle of Wight at the annual regatta of the Royal Yacht Squadron, founded in 1815. The cup itself was cast in 1848.
Stevens and crew won the cup in 1851 with their schooner America. The New York Yacht Club changed the name to the America’s Cup, successfully defending it in subsequent races until 1983, by which time almost everyone had forgotten that it was not originally America’s at all.
Mary Pickford with animals.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“America’s Sweetheart”
Mary Pickford (1892-1979), arguably the first superstar of the silent film era, and then a successful film producer for decades thereafter, was actually born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Stage acting took the entire Smith family to the U.S., where New York producer David Belasco changed Gladys Smith’s name to Mary Pickford in 1907.
Mary Pickford broke into film in 1909, acting in 51 silent movie shorts before the year was out, but her career did not really take off until an unknown publicist dubbed her “America’s Sweetheart” in 1913, in an unabashed appeal to the jingoism of the era.
As she aged, Mary Pickford outgrew the “America’s Sweetheart” billing and was called “Queen of the Movies” instead.
Film industry flacks eventually passed both names to many others, but while Google searching turns up many candidates for “Queen of the Movies,” depending on the era, a search for “America’s Sweetheart” still finds Mary Pickford first in any era.
“America’s dog”
The Best Friends Animal Society appears to have introduced the term “America’s dog” to promote pit bulls in November 2004, alleging that pit bulls were America’s favorite pets during the silent film era.
ANIMALS 24-7 immediately corrected that notion, having already discovered through searching classified ads that pit bulls, by any name, were never more than 1% of the U.S. dog population before 1980, were already so notoriously dangerous that they were banned in Ogden, Utah, in Best Friends’s home state, by 1909, and that practically the entire mythology that Best Friends’ publicists concocted to push pit bulls was lifted nearly verbatim from Pep: The Story of a Brave Dog, by Clarence Hawke, a 1922 work of fiction by an author who, being blind from childhood, never saw a pit bull in his life.
Undeterred, the Best Friends Animal Society hired publicists to promote their “America’s Dog” campaign, and has not looked back despite the 484 U.S. and Canadian pit bull-inflicted fatalities and almost 5,000 pit bull-inflicted disfigurements occurring in the 17 years since.
(See Where the late Bernie Rollin got his garbled “facts” about pit bulls and Dog attack deaths & maimings, U.S. & Canada, 1982-2021 log.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“America’s rifle”
AR-15-type semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles became “America’s rifle,” in apparent emulation of publicists’ success in promoting yacht racing, Mary Pickford, and pit bulls, surprisingly recently––after the July 20, 2012 movie theatre massacre in Aurora, Colorado, by a teenaged AR-15 user who killed 12 people and wounded 70, and after the December 14, 2012 massacre of 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, also by a teenaged AR-15 user.
Searches of NewsLibrary.com and NewspaperArchive.com turn up no mention of the AR-15 as “America’s rifle” before a Sarasota Herald-Tribune columnist used the phrase on October 22, 2014.
That lack of history notwithstanding, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, calling itself “The Firearm Industry Trade Association,” soon posted a defense of the AR-15 called “Understanding America’s Rifle.”
(Beth & Merritt Clifton)
The National Rifle Association and mass media have unquestioningly amplified the phrase ever since.
Yet the Daisy Red Ryder air rifle, introduced in 1938, has eclipsed the AR-15 many times over in cumulative sales. The M1 rifle, also introduced in 1938, may also have outsold the AR-15, despite not having been manufactured in nearly 50 years.
The bottom line is, if you hear anything called “America’s,” chances are it isn’t, and that the appellation “America’s” is at best a deceptive sales pitch.
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Why isn’t Best Friends Animal Society subjected to truth in advertising laws? Why can’t we (class action) sue them for their deceptive marketing which has ruined the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people?
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled over the past 40 years that requiring nonprofit advocacy organizations and fundraisers to tell the truth is a violation of their First Amendment right to free speech, with the very narrow exception that outside professional fundraisers cannot claim that most of a donation goes to the charity if it does not.
Best Friends started out so well. I loved and supported them until they started the pitbull advocacy. I won’t until they stop it, and I’ve let them know why.
Yet another article presented here which gets me thinking, which is never a bad thing !!
But I do have a sincere question, which comes from this part of your article:
“Using “America’s rifle” to kill classrooms of children, theaters of movie-goers, crowds at a concert, and so forth requires the participation of an ‘active shooter,’ as the FBI calls gun-using mass murderers.
“’America’s dog,’ by comparison, often kills people while their owners are sound asleep. And about a third of the ‘America’s dog’ victims are their owners, or other members of their household.”
My question is – is there a certain kind of relationship between the kind of person who lusts after an AR-15 and the kind of person who desires a pit bull type dog ??
Yes, a firearm is only as dangerous as its user intends it to be – but can the same be said about the pit bull?
I only bring this up because I have noticed that the typical pit bull owner out here is some kind of real macho knucklehead, and believe me – I have seen people trying to make their pit bull pups aggressive, I guess because they think that’s cool or fun…..
I myself never want to have an AR-15, or wanted a pit bull for that matter, but as my profile picture shows, I happen to have one – whom I had no choice but to take direct action and adopt out of a very bad situation of neglect and abuse which I witnessed first hand.
Yes, my dog was aggressive when I first met her – but within a short amount of time that stopped once she realized she had a forever home and was going to be kept very calm and quiet, dare I say safe and sound – and 12 years later [she’s now 14] I’d say it’s possibly the greatest success story I have ever achieved.
We know trainers can and often do use violent techniques when training dogs, which to me can lead to more unprovoked violent attacks, because the poor dogs literally have it beaten into them.
There’s a really intense picture out there of a lunging pit bull on a leash being held by a concerned looking Heidi Leuders, and the pit bull is lunging in what to me looks like a violent manner at a skinhead wearing heavy duty bibs, acting in a manner as to almost encourage this kind of behavior.
It’s from I believe a training school which they both ran.
Believe me, I would never have a dog I live with attend anything like that !!
But where I am going with this is – is it really the dogs fault? – or is it the way the dog was trained, and is being raised by its owners.
I realize that the numbers which you provide here on your website do not lie and are quite sobering, but – again I am biased because of my experience with a to be destroyed dog whose rescuer in essence simply put this poor dog from one jail to another – which continued to have the dog exhibit aggressive behavior which I witnessed myself, I saw all that aggressiveness change over time once this dog realized she was going to be loved and kept in a very safe, calm and loving home.
Thank you Merritt and Beth yet again for all you do, and yes… yet another book being ordered which I have learned about though your page.
Pit bull breeding has so far proved non-lucrative for puppy millers because pit bull litters often start killing each other before weaning. Just a small amount of online searching will turn up many videos of this occurring, and of palm-sized pit bull puppies whose eyes are still closed demonstrating death grips with their jaws on ropes. Pit bulls, in short, need no training to fight and be dangerous. Fighting dog trainers don’t train pit bulls to fight; they train the pit bulls to develop greater strength and stamina. In theory, the behavioral traits of pit bulls diminish as crosses move farther from the original “game-bred” lines, but in reality there is no way to visually distinguish “game-bred” pit bulls from any others, and any cross runs the risk of accentuating rather than weakening the “game-bred” traits. Genetic research, moreover, has increasingly demonstrated that the “game-bred” tendencies are innate and distinctive in “bully” breeds. See Pit bulls: new gene study shows it is NOT “all in how you raise them”, Dog brain study refutes every major claim of pit bull advocacy, Dog study let pit bull owners lie & still found behavior is breed-specific, and Second Finn dog study conflates defensive behavior with aggression.
“My question is – is there a certain kind of relationship between the kind of person who lusts after an AR-15 and the kind of person who desires a pit bull type dog ??”
Yes, there is. In the new, militarized subculture, specifically captured in this comic: https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/ , the dogs are yet another lifestyle accessory. To use just the most recent example I’ve seen, the delivery person at my work looks just like one of the guys in the linked comic. He was bragging about breeding dogs and showing off pics. A coworker innocently asked if they were Newfie pups. I nearly laughed out loud–no guy like this is going to breed something as gentle as Newfoundlands. Of course, they were Cane Corsos.
Blame the breeders. Do NOT blame the pit bulls for being bred and alive. Again, go after the breeders!
Assigning “blame” is a matter of moral judgement, and has nothing to do with risk assessment. Risk assessment shows that pit bulls are approximately eleven times more likely to kill someone than the average dog, a Labrador retriever being the most popular breed with an average risk factor, and that pit bulls are perhaps a thousand times more likely to kill someone than either a setter or a pointer, two breeds of size comparable to a pit bull, ranking among the 10 most popular dog breeds for more than a century, which have not killed anyone in the 40 years that ANIMALS 24-7 has logged the data.
ANIMALS 24-7, from our debut in 2014, has repeatedly strongly recommended mandating pit bull sterilization, to stop the breeding, but the data also strongly demonstrates that sterilizing pit bulls does not make them safer. (See Does castration really alter male dog behavior?) The data shows overwhelmingly that pit bulls are unsafe, regardless of how they are kept and trained, by whom. Of course some people beat the odds and keep pit bulls for their lifetime without reported incident, but some people beat the odds in Las Vegas, too. That does not make gambling casinos a safe investment.
You have done a good job informing the public about “risk assessment” of pit bulls.
They are more “unsafe” than other breeds. Many shelters are flooded with pit bulls. People adopt them out of the goodness of their hearts or ignorance or they look cute or…..and then many are returned to the shelters.
Surely Steve Hindi has told you of the numerous often secret dog fighting gambling clubs. I have seen drone footage of the enormous breeding barns for pit bull gambling, and I have read of the horrific training for fighting such as force feeding gun powder, picking up stray dogs for bait training etc. If true, HOW can we figure out a way for us humans to produce fewer of these genetically doomed animals?
Beth, before joining me in marriage & publishing ANIMALS 24-7, was involved in investigating some of those “often secret dog fighting gambling clubs.” But Steve Hindi’s drone footage of “enormous breeding barns” shows facilities producing beagles for laboratory use. Pit bull breeding has so far proved non-lucrative for anyone trying to produce and house litters in volume because pit bull litters often start killing each other before weaning. The very difficult trick for dogfighters is to wean their pit bulls as early as possible and then keep them apart until they are ready for pit fights at maturity.
Just wanted to say, great piece on America’s Rifle (and dog) in the wake of Uvalde. It’s just a matter of time before America gets a “Nanny Rifle.” (Imagine all the lives that could be saved, amirite?)
But your piece also made me reflect on the disparate groups in pitbull advocacy — people who agree on little else:
First: The Conservative Libertarian Pittie People, whose right to own dangerous dogs is like their right to own assault weapons (or their right to NOT wear COVID masks). The fact that pitbulls make others uneasy is a feature, not a bug. They refuse to be bound by fear!! These pitties wear American flag bandanas.
Second: The Ghetto Pittie People, for whom pitties are symbolic of the Hip Hop/Gangsta culture. These pitties wear gold chains and spiked collars, and enjoy an urban lifestyle.
Third: The Granola Pittie People, whose heart bleeds for “the underdog.” Prejuduce against dog breeds is wrong for the same reason that racism is wrong. These pitties wear peace signs and pink tutus.
Keep up the good work.