New York Times Editorial Board Regurgitates Bad Study to Condemn Concealed Carry

Back in June, I detailed a study by the Violence Policy Center that purported to show that private gun owners were far more likely to kill innocent people than to defend themselves. The study arrived at this conclusion by using woefully incomplete data sets from the FBI crime reports, which are voluntarily submitted (or not submitted) by law enforcement agencies. You can read my full analysis here, but the short version is that the VPC study interprets the lack of justified homicide submissions by law enforcement as proof that justified homicides do not occur, resulting in an unbelievable assertion that there were literally zero defensive gun uses in dozens of states over a five year period. The VPC study also fails to distinguish between legal and illegal firearm uses and fails to adequately consider defensive gun uses that didn’t result in anyone dying (i.e. the vast majority of such uses).

This week the New York Times editorial board regurgitated that shoddy study, and managed to compound the illogic by drawing even broader and less supported conclusions than the original. The editorial is brief, yet still manages an impressive amount of specious reasoning.

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