BELLEVUE, WA. – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) today lauded the Violence Policy Center’s (VPC) most recent study on child victims of gun violence for its use of honest statistics in reaching its conclusion.
The VPC released a report stating that an average of two children per day were murdered with handguns in the U.S. from 1995 to 1999. The study excluded figures for suicide and accidental deaths, and properly limited its analysis to youngsters age 17 and under.
“We’re happy that the VPC has given a more accurate picture of how many children are murdered with firearms than other groups, such as the Brady Campaign or Americans for Gun Safety, which artificially inflate their statistics,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Other groups deliberately taint their data by including young adults up to age 19 or 20 – who are often gang members killed by rival thugs in the same age group – in their definition of ‘children’.”
Yet Gottlieb noted that the VPC research deliberately excluded statistics from eleven states which reported less than one child victim per year, using the argument that those rates would be “unreliable.”
“What that really means is that even the VPC has not yet reached the point of complete statistical honesty,” Gottlieb observed, “because adding those states to the formula would have dragged the overall national rate of child homicides even lower.
“While this new VPC analysis is definitely on the right track, and gets closer to the facts” he continued, “it really is just one more in a string of so-called studies generated by anti-gun advocacy groups that omits certain information that would properly dilute the impact of their message.
“Even one child homicide is one too many,” Gottlieb concluded. “But over the years, gun control extremists have wrongly convinced many Americans that such tragedies are at epidemic proportions, using faulty statistics to sensationalize their argument. Though it still relies on exclusionary data, the VPC report at least brings a more honest perspective to the discussion. Alas, while we can always rely on getting anti-gun reports from the Violence Policy Center, we’re still waiting for the opportunity to call them the Honesty Policy Center.”