Put That in Your Pipe and Smoke it: A Tough Year for Gun Control’s Brady Campaign

I generally don't wish ill will to any particular sect, gender, club or creed, but if there's on group I'd like to see smacked down with a rolled up issue of The 1st Freedom, it's the Brady Campaign.

 

 A Tough Year for Gun Control’s Brady Campaign

More bad news for Brady: Collating their scorecards with FBI violent crime shows that right-to-carry (RTC) states — where law-abiding citizens have broader rights to carry a concealed handgun — are becoming safer over time, compared to Brady’s “safest” states, which don’t give citizens such rights. (The graph below displays states’ average violent crime rates by RTC status, with the percentage difference in green.) As of 2010, RTC states were 35.0% safer than non-RTC states, and had a 41.9% lower murder rate, too:

Brady gave RTC states an average scorecard value of 9.0 in 2010, while non-RTC states averaged 51.3. According to Brady, non-RTC states are safer because they enforce more gun control laws such as firearm registration, waiting periods of up to 10 days before you can pick up the gun you already bought, and bans on magazines containing over 10 rounds of ammunition. In Brady’s imaginary world, the above violent crime values would be reversed.

Savvy analysts will rightfully note the above correlations aren’t necessarily significant, and that’s the point: Brady claims that guns cause violence, yet they are unable to cite one comprehensive, significant dataset to corroborate their claims. Instead, they select factoids to support their propaganda, all rendered invalid upon examining the entire source data.
This is why the Brady Campaign is losing credibility, influence, and revenues. By the end of 2009 — the latest year for which data are publicly available — Brady’s total net assets were negative $564,123. Between 2006 and 2009, Brady’s total revenues dropped from $4,636,210 to $4,004,014, including investment income and royalties.