Posted on 12/28/2011 10:33:05 PM PST by neverdem
Grass Roots North Carolina president cites 'cherry-picked' data
In an interview with Human Events, the leader of Grass Roots North Carolina called the December 27 New York Times article on concealed carry permit holders in his state a “hit piece.”
The reporter Michael Luo, who has published other data-match stories with an anti-gun tilt, exposed his bias against gun rights, by choosing tight search parameters that produced the results he needed to support his anti-gun rights narrative, said F. Paul Valone, the president of the gun rights organization.
Valone said he had three to four phone conversations with Luo, in addition to a half-dozen emails as the story progressed that gave him an increasing sense of unease about the direction and methods of the story.
In the article, Luo referred to John Lott, whose statistical crime analysis shows that crime falls when gun ownership increases, but he quickly dismissed Lott’s research as discredited. Valone said when he asked Luo if he had contacted Lott, the reporter told him: “There is no reason to call John Lott.”
To make his points, Luo ran a data-match with two lists, the state’s roster of concealed carry permit holders against the state’s criminal database and sorted out permit holders with criminal records.
Luo found that in a five-year period, out of 240,000 holders, more than 2,400 were convicted of felonies and misdemeanors, not counting traffic violations. He further found that roughly 60 were convicted of violent weapon assaults.
In the same five-year period, 10 permit holders were convicted of murder or manslaughter, although only eight of those 10 used a gun in their crime, the article said.
“By cherry-picking anecdotes from error-prone data matching, reporter Michael Luo creates a false impression of widespread abuse by concealed handgun permit-holder,” Valone said.
“Luo admits not bothering to confirm more than a handful of the matches found, so given the small data set used, the number of ‘false positives’ may well exceed the number of accurate matches.
Luo told Human Events that he did tell Valone he had checked roughly 12 of the matches, but in fact he probably verified more than 12, paying attention to name, date of birth, race and address.
There was no agenda in the story, just an attempt to bring to light the number of permit holders either committed crimes in North Carolina or continued to keep their concealed carry permits after being convicted of felons or misdemeanors, he said.
“Data is data,” he said. “Up to others to draw conclusions on significance.”
Beyond the use of search parameters, Valone said he is upset that Luo did not quote him, despite his telling the reporter that he helped draft the law and after he pointed out provisions in the law that aid law enforcement officers, such as the link between the state’s driver records and concealed permit holders’ records.
“Any concealed handgun permit-holder arrested for a crime would be immediately identified as such,” he said.
“Furthermore, nothing in the law prevents the North Carolina Department of Justice from doing checks on permit-holders to ensure they remain in compliance with the law,” he said. “We not oppose such an effort. If the state fails to avail themselves of those tools, the problem lies not within the concealed handgun law, but instead within its enforcement.”
In a Tweet, the same day the story ran, Luo created the impression that there was no cooperation and conversation between him and the GRNC leader, in this text: “I did ask Grassroots North Carolina, pro-gun group, for examples of permit holders who stopped crimes to include in story, but they refused.”
The reporter, who was assisted by Tom Torok, the chief datatbase editor for the paper and the winner of three Pulizer Prizes, said he was eager to have Valone participate, but he needed examples of concealed carry permit holders who had used their guns to protect themselves or others.
Valone's criticism of the data and his comments about the law and its enforcement did not address the issues in the story, Luo said.
Valone said he discussed with the GRNC board of directors whether he should provide examples, but there was a lack of trust.
“It was the consensus of the board that ‘No good can come of this,’” he said.
“All he would do is pick on that one poor soul and he would call it balance,” he said.
“The NRA has a searchable database and he could have very easily found examples, like we found four or five just in a quick search,” he said.
bump and ping for NYT bias (what’s new???)
“...the state’s roster of concealed carry permit holders...”
-
Well, there’s your problem, right there.
I wonder when “Journalist” Michael Luo will utilize Racial Statistics in his quest to show all the NYT readers the truth about violent crime?
Crickets, nothing but crickets...
In another thread here on FR today is the following:
NYT: Southern Food is Undignified
The New York Times has declared down home Southern cooking undignified in a story that heaped praise on a new generation of Southern chefs while denigrating fried chicken, Cracker Barrel restaurants and the Queen of Southern Food — Paula Deen.
226 replies at:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2826114/posts
Southern Guns - Southern Food, the NYT seems to be showing their bias toward North Carolina today.
A record 16 million gun purchased in the US in 2011. Tomorrows NYT headline will be:
Blood will flow in the streets of North Carolina !
Exactly.
The irony is he doesn’t acknowledge that the permitting is what enabled him to look at the data of gun owners. Go to a state that doesn’t have permits, take 240,000 random citizens from the phone books, and I bet in a 5 year period about 2500 of those random people would be accused of some kind of serious crime too. The article is bogus because the underlying assumption is that gun owners are more prone to crime - there would be no story if they took a random selection of citizens and found out that 8% of them committed a crime.
My point is that (while I disagree with the permit process, you don’t need a permit to exercise a fundamental right) the permit process allows the state to disarm people a lot easier. There are millions of guns in New York state but the cities and state probably has no clue which of the people they arrest have weapons stashed. In NC because of the permit process the state knows to disarm those people - right or wrong. In NYC they can’t even do that much.
Indeed. I shall have to pass that along to my friends in North Carolina... I am CERTAIN they’ll care deeply!!! (Not likely!!!) Ya just gotta love the NYT and their desire to denigrate any and everyone not part of their “elite” friends!!!
The U.S. violent crime rate for the general population was 403.6 / 100,000 in 2010 (source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports). Note that this is just violent crime, which is a subset of felonies, and yet still the general population of the U.S. is more than 23 times more likely to commit a violent crime.
I'll take my chances with the concealed carry population, thank you very much. I wonder what Michael Luo would prefer?
Frankly, I could in general care less about the misdemeanors Luo lumps into his numbers in a transparent attempt to make the numbers look worse for concealed carry holders. Heck, you can probably get one of those for littering. I'll have to ask my friend who was ticketed for throwing boiled peanut hulls out the car window while riding around in rural GA, surely one of the most absurd citations ever. I expect this sort of event would have ended up in Luo's numbers.
Luo clearly has an agenda here, and it isn't a fair and transparent analysis of the data surrounding crime by CCW holders. If he were interested in such a thing, he could have easily included a comparison such as the one I generated above with just a few minutes of research.
Regarding your "In NC because of the permit process the state knows to disarm those people," no one should be disarmed because of a misdemeanor citation. Be careful what you suggest.
So, the Old Grey Lady, the Nation's Record, the pinnacle of journalism and integrity hasn't the facility to do some independent investigation? Certainly the "Whore" has fact-checkers, story researchers, data-bases and computers galore chocked full of the nation's print and electronic media where a touch of the button could yield "prevented crime data"....don't they?
Seems to me this one statement, this one tell bespeaks volumes. It proves NYT writers are not journalists, in fact, but ideologues beset with laziness, troubled ideologies, and, quite frankly, bullshit.
That URL is what you get when you submit the fully extended URL to the bit.ly website to get a shortened version for easier posting. In this case, the NRA Armed Citizen webpage address is not an extended link so it was probably not necessary. Some like it, some don’t...
I would like to add that no one has been able to discredit John Lott’s work. Most who might have the ability have realized that the work stands on solid ground.
There have been a few attempts but they were quite inadequate.
John’s work stands as written, unassailable.
I was aware of absolute and relative links, but not extended links, nor bit.ly. Thank you! Happy New Year!
I haven't seen anybody rebut his work successfully, although they tried.
"In the article, [Michael] Luo referred to John Lott, whose statistical crime analysis shows that crime falls when gun ownership increases, but he quickly dismissed Lott’s research as discredited. Valone said when he asked Luo if he had contacted Lott, the reporter told him: 'There is no reason to call John Lott.'"
Mr Lott, you were mentioned in the above Human Events article.
President Obama's Anti-Gun Agenda Shows No Sign of Stopping
I just posted your latest essay for FOX News on December 28, 2011. IMHO, somebody tampered with your writing.
Of course I’m not suggested to disarm people for misdemeanors. I was merely pointing out that the authors glaring omission that would support his own case - a state that issues permits knows where the guns are. Which is why I oppose permitting in the first place, as I said RKBA is a fundamental right.
Its great to use for long urls in emails as Micro$soft cannot seem to fix a long pasted link - only the first part is the link so you have to highlight and copy the whole thing manually and then click on the abbreviated link and then if you get a 404 (page not found) you can paste to the address line, hit enter and then you get the page desired ...
Its only been a problem for about 15 years - I'm sure they'll fix it real soon now - hey its a new year - this could be the one! ;-)
His work was so good that there have been very few attempts to take his stats on and the ones I have seen, maybe three or four, were not statistically sound.
When you look at every county in the US, the work is very, very thorough. John Lott tried to break his own study because he did not believe the results. They surprised the heck out of him.
I’ve noticed that libtards use this tactic more and more. Whenever a conservative states a fact, it is immediately denounced without relevant stats or data. Later, they insist that the conservative facts have already been proven wrong...and they STILL don’t have anything to rebut it...just that it is now accepted and presented as fact and therefore not open to discussion.
Goebbels would be proud.
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