by Michael Luo of the New York Times wrote an article that claimed more than 2,400 people holding Concealed Handgun Permits from the State of North Carolina had criminal convictions. He says he came up with this number by comparing the names on the state’s database of CHP holders with criminal records.
Sean Sorrentino of An NC Gun Blog started an email dialog with Luo. If you have been reading Sean’s blog for any amount of time, you know he has been tracking the growth of concealed handgun permits in North Carolina and he has been following the background of those arrested for criminal misuse of firearms. As such, he has as good a feel for this as anyone and Luo’s article struck him as wrong. So he contacted Luo and asked for the data.
After much back and forth, Luo told Sean he’d give the data to either a legislator or to NC law enforcement officials. This was the opening Sean was looking for and he contacted Paul Valone of GRNC seeking a friendly legislator to call Luo’s bluff. The bluff was called with the result you’d expect.
So what do you say to an author who refuses a State legislator the data needed to do his job? When that legislator asked for the data, with a mind to crafting new and better legislation along with demanding answers from the State Bureau of Investigation, Luo refused.
Paul Valone, President of GRNC, has now responded to Luo’s accusations with a point by point rebuttal. Somehow I doubt the “paper of making it up” as SayUncle calls it will respond. They are good about making claims about gun owners but not so good about making corrections.
Thanks for the link, John.
We need this video to get wider publication. I'll bet that Luo got to make the rounds of the talking head shows, or will once the HR822 debate starts in the Senate. We need this info to get out so that he faces the difficult question of why he won't show his work to prove his point.
Thank you so much for posting this. I hope a lot of people watch this video.
The hiding of data is something that offends the scientist part of me. The only reason for someone to refuse to release data after they've published their findings based on that data is if they fabricated it. If someone refuses to release their data, they are not a scientist, they are a liar.