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VPC claims re: permit holder's crime
John Pierce has an excellent response.
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The VPC filed an amicus brief in a RI Supreme Court case several years back. It was chocked full of errors, lies and omissions. These people are reprehensible.
Pierce's analysis is a bit superficial and slightly too glib, but makes a couple of good points.
The most important point to use against this study is that, even adopting VPC's purported statistics, the homicide rate by CCW holders is 1/10 the rate in the population as a whole. Although he points out that the statistic on civilian deaths (which isn't even limited to firearms use!) is not based on whether the shootings were ultimately adjudged illegal in court, I suspect that an in-depth examination of each case will ultimately show the large majority to have been justified. Somebody with a little time on their hands (say, while recovering from surgery?) might be able to REALLY embarrass VPC by dissecting their alleged statistics.
A conservative estimate of the number of permits issued and outstanding in Colorado in 2008 is about 70,000. Almost 20,000 were issued in that year. During 2008 exactly 123 permits were suspended or revoked for any reason.
It is not hard to get a permit revoked or suspended. Almost any arrest upon accusation of any type of violence will trigger at least a suspension until the matter is resolved. Other things such as adjudication of mental disease, suicide attempt, failure to report that one is no longer a resident of Colorado, alcohol or drug abuse, a second DUI arrest, etc. will also qualify you for suspension or revocation.
123 out of 70,000 is 0.175% of all permit holders did anything during the year that resulted in a suspension or revocation of their permit. [NOTE: That is not 1.75%, it is less than 18/100ths of One Percent.] I don't know how many of those got their permit reinstated at a later time, but surely some of them did if it turned out that the original problem was resolved in their favor.
I can't prove it but I believe these numbers represent a rate of law abiding that would exceed that of just about any identifiable group, including police officers, clergy and donors to VPC.