Do Guns Protect Us? Violence Policy Center Says No
. . . But Lott's one-sided approach not only forces him to make arguments not supported by facts, but also to ignore data which, at the very least, throws the whole notion of CCW for personal defense up for grabs. I am referring here to the ongoing project of the Violence Policy Center to track killings by concealed-carry licensees, which shows that more than 600 people with CCW killed themselves or others since 2007. The study, of course, is based on media reports that have come to the attention of the VPC, so it is necessarily incomplete, and I suspect that in the suicide category, which comprises slightly less than one-third of the shootings, the real number is substantially higher than what is estimated to have really occurred. . . .
Ah, the Violence Policy Center. Not like they haven't
lost all possible integrity in the past with their "studies". What's next? HuffPo going to run an article on the scientific soundness of Futurecurrent's ET posts on Global Warming?
This was a funny comment posted on the DemocraticUnderground...
"I was reading their web site. Mostly lies as you can assume. But their big thing is tracking how many CC License holders kill people. They include suicides in this total which is stupid because you don't need a CC license to own a gun and shoot yourself.
But where they really fail in in this statement.....
"Above is the current tally from May 2007 to the present of killings involving persons with concealed carry permits
or who committed a killing in public with a legal handgun in a state that allows concealed carry without a permit (Alaska, Arizona, and Vermont allow the carrying of concealed handguns without a permit).
So, if you live in Alaska, Arizona or Vermont and kill yourself or shoot someone and kill them you are included in their CC License holder stats automatically just because you do not need a CC license in those states. So they can really pad their totals with all the citizens of those states.
And there are only 391 on their list since May of 2007. Including suicides. In five years! During the same time there were 40,000 gun murders and 50,000 suicides by guns. So over 90,000 deaths from guns in that period and the CC License holders committed 400 of them. Sounds like a pretty safe group!"