Lie First, Lie Always: The Media Are The Gun Grabbers’ Stenographers

Q: How can you tell a gun grabber is lying?

A: They are attempting to communicate via any way, shape or form.  Verbally or non-verbally.  In any language.

John Lott on how the media – knowingly or not – inflates the gun grabbers’ numbers.  And as national carry permit reciprocity gains speed in Congress, it’s going to get worse.

And it touches on something readers of this blog knew almost a decade ago; the pro-criominal-safety lobby’s pet “think” tank is a room full of lying sacks:

The Violence Policy Center (VPC), the source of these claims, asserts that in the 10 years from May 2007 to April 2017, U.S. concealed handgun permit holders were responsible for 969 nonself-defense gun deaths (with any type of weapon, not just handguns).

We’ve dealt with the VPC and their “statistics” on this blog before, and found them to be pure garbage.  Nohitng’s changed since then:

Looking at the VPC numbers for 2016, they claim that 26 permit holders supposedly committed 29 homicides. With over 15 million permit holders nationwide last year, those deaths amount to 0.2 homicides per 100,000 permit holders.

However, there is an arrest and investigation virtually anytime a permit holder uses a handgun in a public place. Almost all of the 2016 cases are listed as pending, and most of the defendants will be acquitted on account of self-defense.

So as I noted in my 2009 piece on the swine at the VPC, they treated all ambiguous cases as cut and dried murder.  And it gets worse:

The tally of 969 deaths is the result of triple and even quadruple counting. Michigan — by far the worst state according to VPC numbers — supposedly suffered 78 homicides and 390 suicides. Supposedly, Michigan was the site of over 40 percent of all deaths attributed to permit holders.

The main problem is that pending cases are counted in the same way as convictions. The Michigan State Police report the number of pending cases and convictions each year.

But since most cases never result in a conviction and many cases can be listed as pending for two or three calendar years, this results in massive over counting.

An additional 30 cases are added in, as a result of news stories. Apparently, no effort was made to check if these cases were already accounted for in the state police reports.

A case that ends in acquittal will, therefore, be counted four times if it is covered in a news story and is pending for three years. Over the past 10 years, 17 Michigan permit holders were convicted of homicide, not 78.

That comes to 1.7 cases per year, out of 560,000 permit holders in June 2016.

Which gives permittees a homicide rate about one quarter that of the state of Minnesota, and about 1/120th the rate for Michiganders as a whole.

That’s over two orders of magnitude safer than the general public.

And yet what do  you suppose the media reports, with airtight incuriosity?

The VPC’s only “violence policy” is their policy of genocide toward the truth.

One thought on “Lie First, Lie Always: The Media Are The Gun Grabbers’ Stenographers

  1. I remember going through the VPC’s earlier stuff on “Carry Permit Killers” and coming to the same conclusion. Wrong units, partial data, bad coding… try to do that when the media’s not covering for you, you will be creamed.

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