Despite the fact that political actors lying is roughly as rare as pill bugs under piles of garbage, a notable case showed up this week in the New Hampshire Senate race. Kelly Ayotte is being challenged by Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan and by all accounts it’s a tight race. Hassan is getting some outside help though, coming in the form of yet another anti-gun rights group known as Independence USA PAC. It’s a front group put up by Michael Bloomberg as many such entities are and they’re dumping some money into advertising in the Granite State. One of their advertisements is a real doozy, however. It stars Portsmouth Police Commissioner Joe Plaia, and I’ll embed it here for you to check out. Right out of the gate, Plaia starts with a jaw dropping statistic, claiming that every three days someone in New Hampshire is killed with a gun.

Three Days from Independence USA PAC on Vimeo.

Every three days? That’s simply horrifying. Given the sparse population up in New Hampshire they must be encountering the sort of killing fields you generally only see on the South Side of Chicago or Baltimore’s western district. Surely that can’t be right, can it?

No… it’s not. The actual number of gun murders in New Hampshire last year was four. Even for those of you who skipped out on math class, four will obviously be somewhat lower than the more than 120 you would need to account for one every three days. But Plaia is pulling the same dishonest trick that Hillary Clinton has used when trying to scare people into supporting new gun control laws. He’s not counting suicides. This was picked up by Granite Grok almost immediately.

Plaia is playing the false “gun violence” narrative that gun control lobbyists like Bloomberg love to use. There were 121 suicides in which the person who committed suicide used a firearm. There were 126 suicides in New Hampshire last year in which the person did not use a firearm. There were more suicides without firearms. Interesting Plaia doesn’t bothering mentioning those deaths. For the record, Japan has a much higher rate of suicide than the United States and they don’t have firearms.

Plaia also goes on to whine that Kelly Ayotte didn’t vote for universal background checks. What he really means is Ayotte didn’t vote to force family members to have to get background checks in private sales. The entire country already has background checks in place, the entire country, including New Hampshire. There are no gun show or internet loopholes like hoplophobes such as himself like to proclaim. Ayotte voted for a bill that would actually strengthen laws against criminals, not law-abiding citizens.

The ad is filled with additional lies and half truths all the way through, but the misdirection on suicides is the most awful of the bunch. Suicides are a tragedy, but more gun control laws aren’t going to change that statistic much, if at all. In fact, up there in New Hampshire last year more than half the suicides were committed with methods other than guns. There are plenty of ways for a determined person to end their own life and what they need is help, not new gun control laws.

Maggie Hassan must be fairly desperate to allow this sort of “help” from Bloomberg to be put out there unchallenged. But hey… it’s election season, so I suppose we should just expect more garbage like this to show up until it’s over.