Fact checking

Today on Facebook, I saw an image re-posted by a couple of old friends that was an image of a person shooting with a list of "statistics" about how rare it is that a gun is used in a violent crime. The statistics rang as completely false to me as I've been reading about these things lately. There were no proper citations, only "source: FBI and CATO institute" printed in one corner. Well, that isn't a citation. That's a fact that is asking to be checked. The other corner identified the source as "The Bastiat Institute." Now, that sounds official. So I checked it out. You can too, it's easy. Google it. The website looks pretty scholarly. The thing is, when you dig deeper the Bastiat Institute is two guys writing a blog. The guys are sort of low-level tea party wackos "politicians" people.
So then I checked the facts. The FBI does not collect the types of facts that this post "reported." Maybe the ATF. Maybe some other governmental agencies. But not the FBI. In fact, I could not uncover actual studies that backed up the claims on this post. Since I dug for a while, I spent an hour or so on this. But the bottom line is, if there is no academic study or nonpartisan organization attached to your stats, 99% of the time they're bogus. Just like that 99%. Bogus. Feels good to make up though.