Newest piece at Fox News: "Let’s not be so quick to believe gun-control rhetoric"

My newest piece at Fox News on the New York Times reporting the latest Violence Policy Center claims starts this way:

People walking the streets with guns pose a danger to others, right? With 12 million Americans across all 50 states now having concealed handgun permits, one would think that this question would have been settled one way or another.
In fact, contrary to the rhetoric by gun-control organizations, permit holders almost never use their guns to commit violent crimes.
Last Wednesday, The New York Times claimed “there should be no disputing” a new report, which claims there were 722 gun deaths nationwide from May 2007 to February 2015 that were not self-defense. The Times asserts: “The full death toll attributable to concealed carry is undoubtedly larger.”
The Times was too quick to trust the Violence Policy Center report.  A cursory Google search would have shown the Violence Policy Center has a history of making up numbers.
The VPC keeps a record of permit holder abuses in each state. Take the claimed worst state, Michigan. The VPC cites state police and media reports indicating that permit holders committed 277 suicides or murders during the period from 2007 through 2015 (217 suicides and 60 murders). If accurate, a 38 percent share of all 722 deaths nationwide that the VPC attributed to permitted concealed handguns occurred in Michigan.
But suicides are not in any meaningful way linked to the act of carrying a permitted concealed handgun . . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

UPDATE: AWR Hawkins extensively discusses of our analysis at Breitbart.com.  His discussion starts this way:

The Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott explains that the VPC study is written in a way that heightens crime numbers among concealed carry permit holders by lumping suicides and murders together in the states studied. . . .