NYT: Concealed Carry Permit Holders are Murderers .. or something

Misleading statistics have never kept the New York Times from reporting a non-existent problem before and they certainly could not be slowed when coming to the problem of concealed carry permit holders running around killing folks.

The article starts out with an Obama-esq “there should be no disputing” line when referencing the highly misleading statistics the entire questionably-written piece is based upon.

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.

First off, the referenced “new report” is from the heavily anti-gun, rabidly progressive and unabashedly misleading Violence Policy Center led by largely ineffective and vastly misinformed Josh Sugarmann.

To kick things off, here are the hyperbolic, poorly-based numbers:

the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group, found that in research involving 722 deaths in 544 concealed-carry shootings in 36 states and the District of Columbia

Oh my… concealed carry permit holders ran around, drew their concealed carry guns and shot 722 people in 36 states last year. Holy crap! Concealed carriers are killers!

What the New York Times hid from view was the foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric used by the VPC when referencing permit holders. The VPC repeatedly refers to lawful concealed permit holders as  “Concealed Carry Killers.” [emphasis added] But, how would that lead anyone to believe that their statistics were anything but unbiased?

To top it all off, the whole report uses suicides and unresolved incidents to get its artificially high numbers. The report shares that In 84% of incidents the concealed carry killer committed suicide. Soooo, that leaves 16% of the VPC’s “Killers” having actually committed murder.

Out of that microscopic 16%, 20 more of those were accidental shootings. More education would be a better recourse than labeling those misinformed permit holders as killers.  To make a comparison, VPC would call bad drivers “Car Driving Killers” as they kill far more people than the 20 who lost their lives to bad gun owners.

There are other non-murder incidents that reduce the VPC’s “killer” numbers even further, but the point has been made. Concealed carry permit holders are still the “good guys with guns.”