In America’s endless debate about gun rights versus public safety, there should be no disputing the hard facts in a new report on gunshot fatalities showing that at least 722 nonself-defense deaths since 2007 were attributable to individuals with legal permits to carry concealed weapons. Concealed carry by citizens has been a soaring phenomenon as states liberalize laws in the name of lowering crime that allow more permits and easier gun access in public places, even schools, churches and restaurant
via Concealed Carry’s Body Count – NYTimes.com.
The Violence Policy Center once again has updated its terminally flawed and misleading Concealed Carry Killers report. The title itself gives you the idea of gunmen roaming the streets with a license and a gun just shooting people at random, hard-core felons with nothing to lose. Murderers all.
Let’s begin first with the numbers: 722 nonself-defense deaths. Have you ever heard that term? Why the new moniker? Because you see, VPC includes suicides in the 722 in order to pad the outrage. But let’s go to basics: 722 deaths in 7 years or an average of 103 deaths per year. Now, if we use the number Antis bandy about “gun deaths” of 30,000 per year, we have that a whooping 0.34% of those deaths can be “directly linked” to people with a CWP. That is 99.66% of all “gun deaths” have nothing to do with the 10 million people who have a license to carry a weapon. Let me put it this way, if a Concealed Weapons Permit was a vaccine, even the “hippiest” and “hipest” of the Anti-Vaccine movement would have no problem inoculating their kids under those odds. Jenny McCarthy would be on the steps of the Capitol waving a Gadsden Flag in one hand and a pink 9mm SIG in the other demanding every kid in America to have a CWP.
Right off the bat in this report, we are confronted with the word Pending. This means that no determination has been made about this particular individual in a court of law other than he was arrested for killing somebody. Whether or was criminal activity or legitimate self-defense does not matter to VPC: He had a CWP therefore he is guilty and goes on the list. There are 50 individuals listed under Pending and in all probability some will be found guilty of murder/manslaughter, but it would be nice for VPC not to pass sentence a priori.
Next is Suicide. This category covers mostly those Murder/Suicide events or confrontation where people choose to kill themselves. As stated above, Gun Control loves to add the suicide numbers to the overall “gun deaths” to inflate the count, so I was willing to give VPC half a break with Murder/Suicides until we arrive to this:
I went “Holy Chit! Was this a mass event that I missed?” Nope, I stopped and read with care only to realize that VPC is counting plain suicides as regular killings in deviation of what they were doing earlier. Since this event is in page 113, I am guessing they were counting on people not paying attention. They pull the same stunt on pages 117 (with 56 more suicides), 121 (29 suicides), 125 (43 suicides), 138 (28 suicides), 136 (29 suicides) again in Michigan. So in Michigan alone, VPC pads the concealed carry killers (cue ominous music) with 213 deaths that are actually suicides. If we remove theses death from the total tally, we are looking at 509 deaths by (cue ominous music) concealed carry killers!
Next I counted Convicted and got 172 incidents. This would be the only hard number: People with CWP who misused their guns and were tried and found guilty. A far call from the original 722 (cue ominous music) concealed carry killers!
I kept checking for other categories and found that (cue ominous music) concealed carry killers! included accidental shootings where somebody else died even if the owner of the gun was not manipulating the gun or even present at the time!
This time around I did not have the energy to check for individual Pendings and how their trials ended up. It is not the first time that somebody branded by VPC as concealed carry killer was found not guilty because it was determined to be Self-Defense by a judge or a jury. And you can expect that VPC will not apologize for the unfair branding and they will just memory-hole the person from their records..
Listen, I am not gonna sit here, blow smoke rings up your ear canal and say that 100% of all those with a Concealed Weapons permits are saints incapable of doing wrong. But the numbers are what they are and it has been long proven (and even the massaged stats in VPCs “study” supports it) that we are a very safe conglomeration of individuals. It is also been proven that VPC still searches for relevance with a bullshit report and it some was given because the editors at the Nueva York Times Newspaper and Tamales (under new ownership) chose not to do their due diligence. Then again when you are losing money and have to fire people, fact checkers appear to be the first ones to go to the unemployment line.
Shame on the VPC and even more on the NYT. Seeing this made me revisit Clayton Cramer’s take down of this “research” from 2.5 years ago (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2095754) when they had 5 years of “data.” His generous reading of their numbers then showed 79 incidents with 92 deaths over 5 years for nearly 8 million concealed weapon permitees, and a murder rate of 1/20th of the national average. This is just more of the same.
[…] Touting their completely bogus concealed carry killers “report” […]
People like numbers cuz they think that
“Numbers don’t lie”. However, people forget that
“Liars use numbers”.
Mark Twain once wrote: “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Giving this data with no baseline is useless. Take the suicide rate. The CSGV believes that only police should have guns. Well the suicide rate for police is in the range of 120 to 140 per year. with about 900,000 active police officers on duty each year. http://www.policesuicidestudy.com/
So 213 suicides in 5 years out of a pool of between 8 and 11.1 million people is pretty good.
CSGV padding the numbers with pending investigations and suicides proves they are deceptive at best or liars at worst. I go with the last explanation. If you have to lie, you have no case.
Ultimately, I should not care. Our Constitutional rights are not subject to the whims of statistics.
I’d trust any CCW holder to be in the same room with me. No, make that I want them appointed to political office since they clearly have more common sense and honor than 99% of the politicians.
Is it just me, or has the NYT disabled comments for that piece? Funny how they don’t want to have a discussion.
I have been seeing that in different outlets. They miss the days nobody argued with them or proved them wrong
Chicago had 456 homicides last year. ISTR two incidents where concealed-carry permit holders defended themselves, no charges.
And VPC frets over the permit holders.
When I hear of this vPC report, I like to point out that there have been *at least* 287 lightning fatalities in that same period of time. http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/fatalities.htm
Their constant need to inflate numbers to make their case is nothing more than a tacit admission that they really don’t have much of a case to be made in the first place.
Nicely done. I’m going to send this off to my Ultra Liberal Anti-gun cousin. It would be fun to watch the smoke and steam shoot from her ears while reading it.
[…] So, there is ample reason to be skeptical of “research” produced by the VPC. And, in fact, year after year when the VPC publicizes its “Concealed Carry Killers” “data,” people of the gun jump in to poke holes in the “research.” Clayton Cramer already effectively criticized this work 2.5 years ago. It was more recently taken down by Bob Owens on Bearing Arms and Miguel Gonzalez at Gun Free Zone. […]