This is a quick follow-up on J. Kb.’s Not So Good at Math. For those new reading the blog or may have missed it, I covered before the deceptive writings of VPC’s Concealed Carry Killers before. I had not checked on it on a while and decided to see what’s new.
I found a newly designed site and what appears to be a mixture of clickbait with a disclaimer, just like those parody news websites like The Onion of Duffleblog.
And that is how they do it: They beef up the numbers by adding suicides and accidents. And if that is not all, a lot of the remaining cases are tagged “Pending” because the courts have not decided on the particulars and in some incidents charges have not been brought, but they add them just the same.
You click on Florida, and you will see cases like Anthony Martin who shot and killed a person who was fighting a friend and drew his own weapon. Police did not arrest Mr. Martin and even stated that the case might be self-defense. Next we have suicides cases like Jamie Brunette or accidental like Latrecia Levine. But examples like this, take the cake, the biscuits and the pancakes:
Death by strangulation. If you think about it, it is a fact-based story: it was a homicide & the defendant had a concealed weapons permit. The old readers of this blog already know I am going to quote a small dialog from a movie. In fact, I have quoted it so many times and I know I will continue to do so I made a meme:
It seems the Violence Policy center has no problem lying to the readers of this “report” because they will challenge you about having their facts correct. If you read again the first graphic, they are not telling you that Concealed Carriers are shooting people, just that they have a permit to carry. Not true, but accurate.
A fact-based lie.
PS: I forgot about mocking them (just a bit) in the past.
I might have already related my analysis of a VPC report here before, but it’s worth repeating in the context of yours above. In 2013, due to “sequestration,” I was on overhead at a large defense contractor and as such was not allowed to do any real work. After I had thoroughly done as much work-related housekeeping as I could, I dove into VPC’s latest (at the time) report, researching each of the 300+ incidents they had covered.
Like you show above, they featured cases where the incident was still under investigation, when the shooter was not charged, when the shooting was judged justified, murders that did not involve firearms, murders that were not CCW-relevant (i.e. inside the firearm owner’s house), and suicides.
I recall one incident in particular, which was tragic, but was one of their most egregious examples of stretching the truth: a little girl found her mother’s handgun in a closet and accidentally killed herself. Irresponsible storage? Yes. Murder? No. Shot by the mother? No. Related to CCW in any way? NO!
If they don’t add suicides and accidents, the numbers look weak. If they wait till a court renders a decision, then it gets ridiculously low.
Florida’s count (Convicted and died at the scene either facing LEO or committing a crime) is 23. The rest are pending, suicides, accidentals or incompetent. That makes a 69% of the cases just filler to make their case look important. Baloney and hot dogs do not even come close to that percentage.
As of November 2016, Florida has 1,598,213 active CWPs. If we use VPC’s numbers, we have a 0.0046% of Concealed Carriers involved in a death (gun involved or not.) With the weeded out number, it drops to 0.0014%.
Now spread those raw numbers over 10 years since VPC says they only started counting in 2007.
They have been running that scam for years. Several years ago I went through their list and a lot of them were undecided stand your ground or self defense. They just hadn’t been decided by either a judge or grand jury.