PUNK'D: NY Times Editorial Board Falls For VPC "Gun Violence" Report

The editorial board of the New York Times has shredded the last vestiges of their remaining credibility today as they uncritically parroted the findings of a faked gun violence “study” created by inebriated rhesus monkeys and/or Violence Policy Center (VPC) interns.

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The report, “Concealed Carry Killers” is a recurrent propaganda report created by the Violence Policy Center, a small left-wing gun prohibitionist organization dedicated to undermining the basic human right to armed self-defense. The goal of the VPC is to turn Benjamin Franklin’s warning on its head, and trade essential liberty for the illusion of temporary security.

“Concealed Carry Killers” is an on-going Quixotic quest to give the public the impression that people who carry concealed firearms are a threat to society.

This is of course a tall order, as the 11+ million people who carry licensed concealed weapons in the United States have been vetted by their local, state, and national governments with deep background checks. While individual state qualifications vary, the general criteria is that concealed carriers may not have any felony convictions, nor many disqualifying misdemeanors. Concealed carriers are far more law-abiding than the average citizen, and many concealed carriers are better trained with firearms than local law enforcement officers, and are convicted of fewer violent crimes as well.

In order to demonize the practice of concealed carry, the Violence Police Center ran into the insurmountable hurdle of not being able to find a significant number of concealed carriers using their legally concealed weapons to commit violent crimes.

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In order to pad their report, VPC was forced to:

  1. include incidents where concealed carry was in no way part of the alleged crime.
  2. include incidents where there wasn’t even a conviction, but just allegations of a crime.
  3. include unsubstantiated, apparently mythical “crimes” without a named victim or perpetrator.

No, I’m not kidding. This is data pulled from the Violence Policy Center report that the New York Times finds credible… a truly victimless crime.

Prior versions of the same report included “deceased victims” that are still very much alive, and some of those whom VPC asserted were murderers, such as Charles Podany, were exonerated in court or had charges against them dismissed entirely.

Perhaps this sort of information is acceptable to alcoholic monkeys*, unpaid interns that act like alcoholic monkeys, and serially dishonest propagandists such as the staff of the Violence Policy Center, but we expect that the editorial boards of major national news organizations to at least give lip service to the idea of vetting documents before vomiting forth such fact-free bile.

Sadly, this display of ignorance is hardly a victimless crime.

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Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim has recently doubled his investment in the faltering Old Gray Lady, and the grossly over-paid and under-performing editors of the Times have rewarded his generous support by pushing forth this lazy editorial, built on fake research, phantom crimes, and preconceived biases.

Readers and investors in the New York Times deserve better than this poor effort.

Perhaps a shakeup of the editorial board is in order.

 

*Bearing Arms apologizes to any and all primates with substance abuse problems who feel unfairly stigmatized by being compared the editorial board of the New York Times.

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