friendly_iconoclast
friendly_iconoclast's JournalOnce again, the VPC hopes you are both easily frightened and poor at math
The Violence Policy Center has cranked up its evergreen moral panic
"Concealed Carry Killers"- and the gullible and doctrinaire fall for it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22concealed+carry+killers%22&sitesearch=democraticunderground.com
http://www.democraticunderground.com/126210658
Washington, DC Concealed handgun permit holders are responsible for at least 873 deaths not involving self defense since 2007, including 29 mass shootings that killed 139 people, ongoing VPC research shows. Since there is no comprehensive record keeping of fatal incidents involving concealed carry permit holders, this tally most likely represents a small fraction of the actual total.
I couldn't be arsed to look for any 2014 or 2015 screeds from them, so let's
look at one from 2013:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023118413
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 27, 2013
3:18 PM
CONTACT: Violence Policy Center
Avery Palmer, 202-822-8200 x104, apalmer@vpc.org
As Zimmerman Case Begins, VPC Research Details Hundreds of Examples of Innocent Lives Lost to Concealed Carry Killers
WASHINGTON - June 27 - Washington, DC As the trial opens this week over the deadly shooting of Trayvon Martin, research shows that similar fatal incidents are shockingly common. The Violence Policy Center has uncovered hundreds of examples of non-self defense incidents involving private citizens legally allowed to carry concealed handguns. These incidents resulted in 516 deaths including 24 mass shootings and the killing of 14 law enforcement officers.
Doing the math, and according to the VPC, concealed carriers are responsible for 357
deaths over the last three years, or 119 a year.
Lets stipulate, for the sake of this argument, that all of those deaths were murders
even if they were not.
Now comes the part where the wheels fall off the panic mongering.
The lowest estimate I can find for the number of concealed handgun permit holders
in the US is 11.1 million- other figures cited were a high of 12.8 million but
I'll stick with the low one. Taking that number, and using the numbers given by the
VPC, we see that 119/11100000 = a murder rate of 0.93 per 100,000 permit
holders, a rate about one-fifth of the US population as a whole
Source for US murder rate:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-1
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2015/tables/table-3
Worse for the controllers, these numbers mean that those 'concealed carry killers'
kill at a lower rate than does the populations of the UK, France,
Australia (where have I heard that name recenly?), Ireland, Canada...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
http://rboatright.blogspot.com/2013/03/comparing-england-or-uk-murder-rates.html
and at par with Norway and Sweden
The VPC contradicted itself, and the anti-gunners fell for it
From the other group:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/126210633
Self-Defense Gun Use is Rare, New VPC Study Confirms
The new study, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self-Defense Gun Use, analyzes the most recent federal data available, which shows that private citizens use guns to harm themselves or others far more often than to kill in self-defense.
Got that headline and first sentence? A strong clear claim, is it not? Not surprisingly,
given the general mendacity of Josh Sugarman and the VPC, it's not true
Who says so? The VPC itself, in the body of the touted 'study':
http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable16.pdf
Page 5:
Hemenway notes, and numerous others agree, that the most accurate survey of self-defense
gun use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) conducted
by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
And what numbers did the NCVS give for self defensive use of firearms?
From the next page:
"Threatened or attacked with a firearm"
Note: This is *not* the only type of defensive gun use. Sometimes, mere display suffices
and many DGUs are not reported to police - mine wasn't, for instance
Cut to the chase- how many of these 'rare' occasions happened during the period under study?
262,500
From the same page:
Violent Crime 2012-2014
Property Crime 2012-2014
Self-Protective Behavior
Threatened or attacked with a firearm
163,600 99,900
Given the total number of DGUs, and even accounting for the restricted definition,
262,500/731 (days) = 359 defensive gun uses per day 2012-2014
How many people were murdered via firearm in 2013? The FBI says 8454:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2009-2013.xls
8454/365(days) = ca. 21 firearms murders per day
Therefore in 2013 there were 18x as many defensive gun uses (using the VPC's own
restricted definiton than there were murders via gun
If GD:P is important to you, start downloading and saving it now before it closes
I find GD: Primaries fascinating, so I will be 'caching' it for historical purposes
Granted, DU isn't a hotbed of Memory Hole use like Free Republic- but GDP *will* be going
away in a few weeks. So if any of you want to keep it permanently, you need to get
a few terabytes worth of external drives (or a BD/DVD burner and a spindle of blank discs)
and get busy- I've got a couple of drives I can fill...
In yet another Massachusetts town, further gun controls are rejected
Two months back, it was Lexington:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172189304
Yesterday, it was Longmeadow's turn, previously discussed at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1172190855
It turned out even less well for the controllers than it did in Lexington:
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/05/longmeadow_town_meeting_defeat.html
LONGMEADOW Longmeadow residents defeated three proposals for increased gun control bylaws with overwhelming majorities in a Town Meeting that also rejected a 20 mile per hour speed limit, and designated Wolf Swamp fields as a recreation space.
For more than an hour, nearly 1,000 residents who attended Town Meeting Tuesday night debated the three citizen-led initiatives to impose bylaws that would have imposed $300 fines for carrying guns in public buildings, possessing an assault weapon and required gun owners to register their weapons with the police department...
...All three bylaw proposals failed by an overwhelming majority.
One report said the vote was 950 to 30. Heh!
'Gun safety organizations' are no different from 'crisis pregnancy centers' in that...
...their true purposes are elided by those who operate them, and I wouldn't trust
either sets of management as far as I could throw them.
Profile Information
Member since: Fri Sep 8, 2006, 12:47 PMNumber of posts: 15,333