Jeff at Alphecca and SailorCurt point us at a positively wonderful editorial:
Now consider this statistic: Concealed handgun permit holders have killed 107 people since 2007. That news, from the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., sounds pretty bad – until you put it in context. How many Americans have been issued a permit to carry a concealed weapon?
The Violence Policy Center doesn’t say. And it’s probably impossible to pin down a precise number, because records are kept on a state-by-state basis, and reporting criteria differ from state to state. But NRA estimates put the number in the neighborhood of 5 million, as of a couple of years ago. (The NRA adds that permit applications have jumped 50 percent since the 2008 elections – which seems borne out at least here in Virginia. At present there are 211,435 active permits in the commonwealth. Just this year, Virginia courts have granted more than 62,000.)
If that’s true, then the percentage of concealed-carry permit holders who have killed someone with a firearm comes to two one-thousandths of 1 percent. Yet to listen to the VPC’s Kristen Brand – who says “concealed handgun permit holders are killing people over parking spaces, football games, and family arguments” – you’d think the cohort of permit holders was as dangerous as the gang at Rikers Island.
We have already discussed the copious lies from the VPC, so their intentional msidirection and misinformation in this particular instance is not terribly surprising. After all, if anti-rights hoplophobes were to put their numbers in something approximating context, more people would realize that those hoplophobes are unquestionably full of gos-se, and Lord knows we would not want that! Lying and malicious misdirection are much better tactics.
However, what makes this editorial so great is how the writer ended it:
Of course, homicide is not the only crime you can commit with a gun, and concealed-carry permit holders have committed other crimes, too. On the other hand, gun-rights groups point out that sometimes gun owners can stop or deter a crime.
Estimates of how often this happens vary wildly, from 108,000 times a year (the 1993 National Crime Victimization Survey) to 1.5 million (Department of Justice, 1994) to more than 3 million (a 1976 California study). Florida criminologist Gary Kleck may have produced the most scrupulous count, which he puts at 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses.
[...]
Should states make it harder to get a permit? Perhaps – but not because of the VPC’s statistics, which make concealed-carry permit holders seem a lot safer to be around than, say, airbags.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, airbags have saved 25,000 people – and killed 290. If a pharmaceutical company came out with a new drug that killed more than one person for every hundred lives it saved, Washington would ban it in a heartbeat. Yet airbags are federally mandated. Maybe the Violence Policy Center should look into that.
*Zing!*
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