The liberty control movement is getting absolutely fleeced by Josh Sugarmann.

The head of the Violence Policy Center had precisely one reporter (me) ask a question during his pre-NRA Annual Meeting spin-fest, and that question was to ask why he continued to lie with his poorly-researched (actually, “fabricated” would be a more accurate term) continuing propaganda report, “Concealed Carry Killers.”

John Lott provided that data I used that nailed Sugarmann to the wall:

The Violence Policy Center regularly puts out these bogus charges in a report called “Concealed Carry Killers.” But how does it claim to arrive at these numbers?

The VPC collects cases of permit holders’ abusing their permitted concealed handguns for each state. For Michigan, for example, it cites state-police reports on permit holders indicating that 185 died from suicide during the period 2007 through 2012. Surely some alarm bells should have gone off, with Michigan suicides supposedly making up 29 percent of all 636 deaths nationwide the VPC attributed to permitted concealed handguns.

But more importantly, the suicides are not in any meaningful way linked to the issue of carrying a permitted concealed handgun outside of one’s home. If you look at page 2 in the latest report from the Michigan State Police, you will see that in the listing of suicides, there is no indication of specific cause of death. The report merely notes that 56 permit holders committed suicide, without saying whether any or all of them used a gun. Interestingly, the suicide rate among permit holders in Michigan in 2010 (13.3 per 100,000 permit holders) is lower than the rate in the general adult population (16.30). But typically suicides — with or without guns — take place at home. So, again, what would these numbers have to do with the concealed-carry debate?

Yes, Sugarmann is cooking the books by attempting to claim concealed carry is responsible for in-home suicides, as utterly absurd as the claim is to even the most casual observer.

Of course, this is nothing new. VPC’s propaganda—there is no way to credibly call what they produce “research”—is so bad that they’ve even “killed” people that never died to increase bogus numbers.

As noted above, Sugarmann’s most recent batch of lies were exposed by John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). If you value the visceral delight in watching dishonest propagandists like Josh Sugarmann, Shannon Watts, and other liberty control cultists exposed, I’d suggest becoming part of the real grassroots by donating to the CPRC’s fundraising drive.

The more data we have that proves the worth of an armed society, the faster we’ll take back our Second Amendment rights from those astroturfed groups that seek to deny us our rights.