Free Republic

Washington, DC — Newly available data for 2013 reveals that states with weak gun violence prevention laws and higher rates of gun ownership have the highest overall gun death rates in the nation, according to a Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Meanwhile, states with the lowest overall gun death rates have lower rates of gun ownership and some of the strongest gun violence prevention laws in the nation. However, even in these states the human toll of gun violence is far above the...

While anti-gun groups all seem fixated on the notion that the "gun lobby" (a term they use as a synonym for the NRA, despite the wild inaccuracy of that idea) is primarily motivated by a mutually profitable relationship with the gun industry, it's the Violence Policy Center that pushes this charge most consistently and shrilly. This column has covered VPC's obsession with that issue before: The group's executive director Josh Sugarmann has written several Huffington Post opinion pieces on just that subject: "NRA, Board Members, Have Financial Stake in Stopping Ban on High-Cap Magazines," "NRA Receives Millions from Gun Industry...

With many independent voters still undecided in the presidential election, May 30th was as good a time as any for Media Matters and the Violence Policy Center to try to push those independents toward the groups' own fringe territory. They did so with the "end justifies the means" attitude that's typical of how they and their political allies pursue their goals. Media Matters is a George Soros-funded propaganda operation that describes itself as "a progressive research and information center dedicated to . . . correcting conservative misinformation." The Violence Policy Center was founded (and is still led) by a former...

The Violence Policy Center released a report today that analyzed and compared firearm and motor vehicle related deaths for the year 2009 on a state-by-state basis. They found that in ten states firearm related deaths outnumbered deaths caused by motor vehicles. These states are Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, and Washington VPC Legislative Director Kristen Rand states, “Americans are reaping the benefits of smart safety regulation of motor vehicles. The idea that gun deaths exceed motor vehicle deaths in 10 states is stunning when one considers that 90 percent of American households own a car while...

On November 1, Wisconsin became the 49th state to recognize the right of its citizens to carry firearms. Now, only one state remains in the Dark Ages -- that being the state of Illinois. As can be imagined, the anti-gun media is predicting that letting citizens carry firearms will result in carnage in the streets, shootouts in bars, and angry parents settling scores on the ball field with their firearms. And to supposedly prove their point, they cite a bogus report of the Violence Policy Center (VPC) entitled “Concealed Carry Killers.” The faux report says that “since May 2007 at...

Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center ramped things up a notch, claiming “Concealed carry permit holders don’t prevent mass shootings, they perpetrate them. They don’t support police, they shoot them.” Really. I didn’t make that up. That is what hatemongering citizen disarmament bigots want everyone to believe about Wisconsin becoming the 49th state to recognize some form of concealed carry. My latest “Rights Watch” column for GUNS Magazine, dealing with this development, is now online. Click here to read it. And click here for earlier columns. Also, regular Gun Rights Examiner readers know that I regularly link up to...

In the late 1980s, the gun industry began targeting women to counter slumping handgun sales among its primary market of white males. The false message delivered by gunmakers was clear: the greatest threat posed to a woman was an attack by a stranger and, the best form of protection a woman could rely upon was a handgun. Much to the disappointment and consternation of the gun industry, these efforts for the most part have failed. A 1995 study by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducted by Tom Smith and Robert J. Smith found that handgun ownership among women was,...

Recently gun dealers were sent a large manila envelope from the NH Firearms Safety Coalition. The packet contained a number of items with a disturbing anti-gun-rights message, including a full color poster... The funding path goes down from the Harvard School of Public Health to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center to the Bohnett Foundation and the Joyce Foundation. Both the Bohnett and Joyce foundations are infamous for being extremely anti-gun-rights.The David Bohnett Foundation "supports and encourages groups that promote the goals of reduction and elimination of the manufacture and sale of handguns in the U.S." (Emphasis added) The Bohnett...

The Violence Policy Center just released a new report today condemning the National Rifle Association for accepting donations from those in the gun industry. They also condemned the "round-up" or "add-a-buck" programs. They are calling both types of these programs "Blood Money". The so-called research report is called Blood Money: How the Gun Industry Bankrolls the NRA. By the estimates of the Violence Policy Center, the NRA has received between $19 million and $52 million since 2005 from the gun industry. The largest single contributor is MidwayUSA. While I know Larry and Brenda Potterfield are quite generous with their own...

“Reports that Texas sends more guns to Mexico than any other state is not startling; more so, it's logical. We're the largest state on the southern U.S. border,” the El Paso Times Editorial Board declares. The likely culprits, we are told, are Houston gun shops. Let’s examine their “logic.” Here’s how the editors evidently think the scheme works: Just in Houston alone, a person can buy guns from a different dealer at least 300 times a year. No dealer is going to remember one person, who one time, for example, purchased two automatic weapons from his store. Multiply that times...

Violence Policy Center executive director Josh Sugarmann is gleefully shouting from the rooftops that concealed carry licensees in Michigan are statistically more likely to commit suicide than is the general population. The Huffington Post presents Sugarmann's latest triumph: According to information from the Michigan State Police, for the period July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008, 29 of Michigan's 164,793 concealed handgun license holders took their own lives for a concealed handgun license holder suicide rate of 17.6 per 100,000 license holders. For the period July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009, 28 of Michigan's 182,749 concealed handgun license holders...

The Violence Policy Center's own data in a study they just released prove that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens causes LESS crime.........

People walking the streets armed with guns must be dangerous, right? A newly revised study by the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center found that even those individuals who have legally obtained permits to carry concealed handguns are extremely dangerous. With millions of Americans already having been issued such permits from the various states, this is an important issue. The gun control organizations have frequently made these claims in the press, and Dennis Henigan, the vice president of the Brady Campaign, will likely make these claims again when he and I appear on John Stossel’s FoxBusiness show today. But...

Josh Sugarmann is the execuitve director of the Violence Policy Center (VPC), which advocates banning all handguns, .50 caliber rifles (and other "heavy sniper rifles," as the VPC calls large caliber scoped rifles), "intermediate sniper rifles" (the VPC's term for not-so-large caliber scoped rifles), so-called "assault weapons" (semi-automatic rifles and shotguns)--and undoubtedly others. The VPC's main function, as best I can determine, is to make the Brady Campaign look "moderate" (an appearance the Brady Campaign has sought, to the extent of changing their name, formerly Handgun Control, Inc., and radically softening their stated goals). While the Brady Campaign's success at...

Washington, DC--Concealed handgun permit holders have killed at least nine law enforcement officers in addition to 152 private citizens (including 15 shooters who killed themselves after an attack) since May 2007 according to the latest update of Concealed Carry Killers, a Violence Policy Center (VPC) on-line resource that tallies news reports of such killings. The web site, located at http://www.vpc.org/ccwkillers.htm, is updated monthly to include new fatal shootings since May 2007 by concealed handgun permit holders and any changes in the legal status of permit holders facing criminal charges. (Any concealed handgun permit holders who are eventually acquitted of their...

Yesterday’s column about the record number of concealed pistol license holders overlooked one point that should be mentioned: The anti-gun Violence Policy Center has a website devoted to homicides allegedly committed by people who have carry permits. The website, Concealed Carry Killers, keeps a running tally that claims more than 150 victims of legally-armed citizens, and the count includes nine police officers. This was put together, of course, to discredit the 6 million citizens who haven’t killed anybody with their legally-carried handguns. One might wonder if this scorecard includes Barbara Graham of Washington, D.C. Well, no, it couldn’t, because she...

The rabidly anti-gun Violence Policy Center (VPC), which sometimes criticizes the Brady Campaign for not being anti-gun enough, has released another of it's "studies." This one covers familiar territory for the VPC, being one of many of its calls for a federal ban of so-called "assault weapons"--defined vastly more expansively than the 1994 ban. Before we get to the study itself, though, let's take just a second for background. The VPC has for decades been one of the leading cheerleaders for bans of what are, basically, semi-automatic rifles. Back in 1988, their executive director Josh Sugarmann was surprisingly candid about...

More than 900 black males between the ages of 14 and 17 killed somebody in 2007. Should we be scared of young black guys? Of course not. There are roughly 3 million black males in that age group in the United States. It would be horribly unfair to toss around the first statistic without mentioning the second; doing so would be misleading, if not malicious. 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...

She was never even shot. She survived a beating and watched two men’s lives end, and that is horror enough. But now the widowed Mrs. Burroughs has become something else — a symbol of what happens when the agenda-driven biases of true believers corrupt pseudo-scientific research. Sadly, the non-death of Christine Burroughs was just part of the Violence Policy Center’s attempt to demonize carry permit holders as a group. It can’t even claim to be sure that its including valid permit carriers among those they would demonize. While the VPC cites Humberto Delgado as having a North Carolina-issued concealed carry...