Most people who are familiar with the Violence Policy Center (VPC) know that the Court’s decision appears to doom the very thing for which the little anti-gun fringe group was formed–a total ban on handguns.
As it happens, this also appears to have sent Josh Sugarmann, Kristen Rand and their one or two fellow VPC employees into conniption fits. After the Court’s decision became known, at least the Brady Campaign pretended to address the decision’s substance, claiming it gave a green light to the states to impose every form of gun control short of a total ban on handguns. But VPC, used to living fat off the dole from the Joyce Foundation, hysterically claimed that “People will die because of this decision” and “areas of the country with the highest concentration of gun ownership also have the highest rates of gun death.”
Scary sound bites indeed. But VPC’s religiously-held belief that increasing the number of privately-owned guns necessarily causes firearm-related deaths to increase is proven false by the fact that, since 1991, as the number of firearms in the U.S. increased by about one-third, the firearm-related death rate decreased by more than one-third. The best estimate is that guns are used for protection 3-4 times more often than to commit a crime, and the disparity between defensive uses and criminal homicides with guns is much greater.
NRA-ILA
July 2, 2010
VPC’s Self-Induced Plunge Into Irrelevancy Continues With Knee-Jerk Reaction To McDonald Decision
[Conniption fits indeed! And maybe some sort of psychosis. In addition to the delusion that increased gun ownership means increased violent crime the people at the VPC have a hallucination that the NRA is a lobbyist for gun manufactures rather than a civil rights group for individuals.
Someone should remind them to take their meds on a more regular basis.–Joe]
