NYT article: "Concealed Carry's Body Count"

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Str8Shooter

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I stumbled across this editorial on the New York Times website referencing a Violence Policy Center report on shootings by concealed carry permit holders. The main premise is that CCW advocates are lying about how often permit holders commit gun crimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/opinion/concealed-carrys-body-count.html

Here's a link to the VPC report:

http://www.vpc.org/ccwkillers.htm

I'm sure most here have a pretty low view of the objectivity of both NYT and VPC on the topic of concealed carry, but what's your opinion about the validity of this report?
 
They provide pdf format reports citing their sources. Seems pretty clear cut to me. But someone a bit smarter and data savvy than me could whip up some numbers showing that as a whole, concealed carriers are statistically less likely to commit murder.
 
It wouldn't upset me if they didn't use such a misleading name...
I do remember that in my college public speaking class, one of my projects was pro-CCW, and I actually used some VPC 'statistics'. One, because that source of drivel silences any arguments and two, because it was still in favor of CCW when put into plain objective perspective. At that time, at least.
 
One, the VPC admits that the information is not rigorously vetted. Two, 11 million concealed carry holders did not hurt anyone. Using the VPC's questionable numbers it appears that .007% of concealed carriers are involved in homicides. In other words, nearly 100% are not involved.
 
Also, at the time, they specified 'homicide,' or even just 'killing,' but not 'murder'. I'm not wasting my time reading the current one, but at that point it included those charged, not convicted.
They did everything short of just plain making stuff up to vilify it, and I could still point at it and say "Here's math. That is .00X%, opposed to Z% of people without licenses." Even padded to just-short-of-falsified, it was a tiny fraction.
 
I'm really not surprised that an organization run by a man who says the following below, skews stats on a consistent basis. He and his organization thrives on misinformation and the ignorance of anti gunners. It's amazing how blasé he is about it and freely admits it in his books.


"Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons."

-Josh Sugarmann, "Assault Weapons and Accessories in America," 1988[7]
 
In studying the 544 shootings, the center found 177 cases where people with gun licenses were ultimately convicted of crimes, including homicides, and 218 cases where the permit holder used the gun to commit suicide.
Click to expand...

Weasel words of high magnitude.
 
722 non-defense deaths since 2007. My calculator says that is about 90 per year. I would be willing to bet that low of a rate puts it in the lowest category of preventable death. Drownings, poisons, and falling all take far more lives than concealed carry. I for one am glad they posted this article, because anyone with a calculator and a tentative understanding of statistics will see just how rare being shot by a CCW are, as long as you aren't committing a crime.
 
"Concealed Carry's Body Count"

Anyone still doubt these folks think we're all murderers (and the implications)?

TCB
 
177 convicted of crime, 69 pending, 44 murder-suicide (or killed in the event), for a total of 290 criminal events. Since May 2007. 80 months. 3.625 a month. In 2014 in the city of Chicago there were 388 people shot and killed, that is 32.3 per month. A city with a population of 2.7 million. Versus a population of better than 11 million. 10x's the shot and killed rate with 1/4 the population.

3.625 shootings a month by concealed carry permit holders is shameful, and we need to do what we can to cut those numbers. But we can put the "body count" attributed to concealed carry in perspective.
 
Clayton Cramer has a paper refuting the VPC doc - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2095754
Click to expand...

And here is another by John Lott also refuting the numbers in the VPC report:

http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2014/04/massive-errors-in-the-violence-policy-centers-concealed-carry-killers/

The following is quoted from the above link:

— Even though there are a lot of errors in the VPC numbers, assume that the VPC claim of 636 deaths (including suicides) are correct, one has to note that there are over 11 million concealed handgun permit holder in the US right now. An annual number of deaths of 90, the rate is 0.00083%. The rate of non-suicide deaths is obviously even lower, 0.00058%.

— A comparison can also be made to the rate that police are arrested or convicted of firearms related crimes. Police were convicted of firearms violations during the period from January 1, 2005 through December 31, 2007 at a rate of about 0.007%.
Click to expand...


The link below refers to a report also written by John Lott dated last July which doesn't directly address the VPC report, but is a very good read on CCW trends in general:

Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States
 
The New York Times has gone from Americas, Newspaper of Record ,to a slimy Socialist mouthpiece.

It's a sad decline for what once was a proud Organization. Like Time Magazine, they slid down that Slippery Slope. Recovery is impossible.
 
“Deaths in 544 concealed-carry shootings in 36 states and the District of Columbia, only 16 cases were eventually ruled lawful self-defense…”

Interesting since DC has only issued 8 CCW’s very recently. Kind of discredits the whole article.

“More gravely, the study found that the fatalities included 17 law enforcement officers shot by people with legal permits along with 705 slain civilians.”

Strange that no LEO fatalities and only a few civilian deaths by CCW holder have hit the anti-gun media that I can recall.

And 722 non-self defense deaths in eight years? Heck, that’s only a weekend total of non-CCW holder in Chicago.
 
Also, at the time, they specified 'homicide,' or even just 'killing,' but not 'murder'. I'm not wasting my time reading the current one, but at that point it included those charged, not convicted.
Click to expand...

That misunderstanding of what "homicide" means has been used to pad the stats for years. When cities show their stats for "homicide by guns" they are including all justifiable homicides, which include clean police shootings of criminals.
 
they also said 177 or so were convicted of homicide....and other crimes.

makes me wonder if some were justified shootings, but a conviction on some minor misdemeanor?
 
Using stats provided by VPC tells you immediately that the article is going to be filled with exaggeration, falsehoods and outright lies.
 
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