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“Guns in Public, and Out of Sight” paints all NC concealed handgun permit-holders as felons.

Grass Roots North Carolina for Firearms Education

North Carolina --(Ammoland.com)- Have You Defended Yourself With A Gun?

GRNC is seeking concealed handgun permit-holders who have used firearms in self-defense. This includes anyone who has fired, brandished or even referred to a firearm in order to deter a violent crime. If you prefer, your identity will be withheld. Send your stories directly to GRNC president Paul Valone at president@GRNC.org.

Mike Luo’s Crusade
Following an extensive interview between GRNC president Paul Valone and New York Times reporter Mike Luo, the Times is now trying to depict North Carolina’s population of concealed handgun permit-holders as rife with felons. To support his claims, Luo relies on flawed methodology, misuse of anecdotal data, and selectively ignored facts he learned during the interview. The current piece is at least the third time Luo has written biased and misleading articles on gun ownership.

Biased Anti-Gun NY Times Reporter Mike Luo

Figures lie…
Although Luo claims to have done data-matching between criminal databases and permit-holders, he admitted confirming only a dozen matches with the NC State Bureau of Investigation.

Data matching between large databases is subject to high rates of “false positives” depending on the number and type of parameters matched.

To quote one data mining whiz: “The problem is that if you’re trying to search a couple of large data sets for something that occurs infrequently, the number of true hits (if any) is likely to be far less than the number of false positives.”

…and liars figure
When asked whether Luo would confirm all matches with the SBI, or whether he would do statistical analysis of his data, determining what percentage of North Carolina permit-holders commit crimes, or whether he would simply provide misleading anecdotal examples as he did on a November 13, 2011 piece on restoration of gun rights for felons, Luo refused to answer.

How Luo creates a false impression
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”: By pulling a small number of anecdotes rather than verifying all of the data, Luo hopes to paint a false portrait of NC concealed handgun permit-holders as criminals.

Selective data: Luo has a reputation among researchers for cherry-picking research to support his assertions, and for failing to disclose the gun-related leanings of researchers he cites.

The Charlotte Observer fell over itself to propagate Luo’s deceptive story

The Charlotte Observer ran this insult to their gun-owning readership as front page news!

GRNC president Paul Valone responds

“What The New York Times recently published is a biased ‘hit piece’ designed to undermine the unerringly successful expansion of concealed carry laws. By cherry-picking anecdotes from error-prone data matching, reporter Michael Luo creates a false impression of widespread abuse by concealed handgun permit-holders. Luo admits not bothering to confirm more than a handful of the matches found, so given the small data set used, the number of “false positives” may well exceed the number of accurate matches.

“Even Luo’s claim of 2,400 crimes by permit-holders – which includes DUI convictions and relatively minor misdemeanors – represents only a tiny fraction (0.6%) of the 395,251 concealed handgun permits approved since 1995. Moreover, data from other states reveals that few permit revocations result from misuse of firearms.

“As Luo was told during the interview (but chose to ignore), when Grass Roots North Carolina helped draft the state’s concealed handgun law in 1995, we gave law enforcement officials the tools for permit revocations by attaching concealed handgun permit information to the state drivers’ license database. Any concealed handgun permit-holder arrested for a crime would be immediately identified as such.

“Furthermore, nothing in the law prevents the North Carolina Department of Justice from doing checks on permit-holders to ensure they remain in compliance with the law, nor would we oppose such an effort. If the state fails to avail themselves of those tools, the problem lies not within the concealed handgun law, but instead within its enforcement.”

IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED:

Leave Website Comments: Leave comments on both the New York Times and Charlotte Observer websites

• NYT:http://tiny.cc/t9wpo
• Charlotte Observer: http://tiny.cc/uhq04

Use Paul Valone’s response to guide your comments

Write Letters to the Editor

Write letters to the Editor of both newspapers

• You can submit a letter to the Charlotte Observer here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2008/08/05/108022/write-the-forum.html
• You can submit a letter to the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/site/editorial/letters/letters.html

Use the suggested text below to guide your letters.

Deliver This Message

Dear Editor,

I was very disappointed by Mike Luo’s one-sided and flagrantly misleading article that you recently and irresponsibly published. This article was an affront to millions of law-abiding North Carolinian gun owners.

It is telling that Luo claims to provide a “detailed look” at concealed carry in our state, but doesn’t bother to go even to the minimal extent of comparing handgun permittees to the NC population at large.

If he had been interested in the truth he would have learned, and could have responsibly communicated to your readers, that North Carolinians with concealed handgun permits are orders of magnitude less likely to be convicted of crime than is the general population.

According to Luo’s own numbers, out of 240,000 permittees only 2400 were convicted of felonies and misdemeanors over the last five years. This is a rate of 1 % in five years, or 0.2 % per year. For NC in general from 2005 to 2010 (the latest information available from DOJ) there was a yearly average of 5333 felonies (not including misdemeanors) committed per 100,000 in population, a rate of 5.3 % per year.

Luo’s type of politically-motivated yellow journalism has become all too common. Shame on you for participating in his disservice to your readers, and for delivering his insult to hundreds of thousands of law-abiding NC concealed handgun permittees.

About:
Grass Roots North Carolina/Forum for Firearms Education is a non-profit, all volunteer organization devoted to educating the public about trends which abridge the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and engaging in grass roots activism to preserve those freedoms. Formed in 1994 to conduct a highly successful rally for the Second Amendment, GRNC has gone on to conduct projects like “Remember in November: A Gun Owner’s Guide to Voting,” bringing concealed carry to North Carolina. Visit:www.grnc.org

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The Secrets of Soros, Obama, Occupiers & the Mainstream Media
By Chuck Norris

AmmoLand Gun News

Dallas, TX - -(Ammoland.com)- While Occupy protesters continue to rant in select cities around the country, I’m wondering who is shadier: corporate Wall Street or corporate media?

Of course, there’s no surprise or secret in saying that the mainstream media (MSM) are biased. Even when the CBS producer inadvertently sent an anti-Michele Bachmann email to one of her own staff members during last Saturday night’s GOP debates, her campaign manager confessed it was another evidence of “what every conservative already knows — the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message.”

But have you noticed the particularly rapid acceleration of progressive MSM news reports in the last decade? Even for veteran news viewers, it is sometimes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

But how fair is that augmented bias for most trusting and unsuspecting Americans who turn to news for objectivity and comprehensive reporting?

Like many of you, my wife Gena and I are avid watchers of local, national and global news. Though we have our own preferences, we try to acquire a broad understanding of the big issues. But for quite some time, if we want to obtain the “complete news,” we often have to go to multiple sources. And we feel for other hardworking people (including homemakers) who don’t have the time to read and research like we do.

Gone are the days when broadcasters like Walter Cronkite attempted to convey objective and unbiased news. Propaganda seems to be at the heart of most national news. Passions, preferences and political persuasions permeate nearly all the news. Opine is ubiquitous and made obvious alone by many broadcasters’ tone of voice or facial expressions.

As reported by NewsBusters (www.newsbusters.org), consider in a single day last week how the MSM angled their reporting in ways to manipulate public opinion and align it with their corporate media (supporters) bias, which ironically (or maybe not so) parallels White House prejudice.

• — “Networks Hit Cain With 117 Stories; ABC: Accusers Seek ‘Safety in Numbers’ From Cain.”
• — “NBC Uses Penn State Scandal to Slam Catholic Church.”
• — “NPR Asks Bill Clinton: Obama’s Seen As Liberal, ‘How’d That Happen’?”
• — “New York Times Spikes Fast & Furious Hearing in Print, Omits Eric Holder’s Admission Completely.”
• — “CNN to Perry: Convince Us Your Campaign Isn’t Finished.”
• — “New York Times Twice Omits Obama From Headline to Embarrassing Insults of Netanyahu.”
• — “Newt Mocks (CNBC journalist’s) ‘Funny’ Defense of the Liberal Media.”
• — “CNN Spins Elections as Republican Setback.”
• — “ABC and CBS Spike Ohioans Rejection of ObamaCare Mandate, NBC Sees Voter Call for ‘Restraint.”

The Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs even confessed that big business monies funneled via the MSM molds and directs the public’s social and political viewpoints: “The summits of American business now control or powerfully influence the major media that create American public opinion.”

The fact is that the primary networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — and their smaller cable channels are owned and financed by an interlocking network of corporate conglomerates and controlled by progressive and politically biased proprietors.

Billionaire moguls like George Soros are using millions and millions of dollars not to ensure the second coming or election of President Obama but also to carry out a greater goal of chipping away the very foundations of our republic.

Just a few months ago, Media Research Center’s Dan Gainor exposed globalist George Soros’ financial connections to MSM and his funding of $52 million to influence and direct journalism in the national networks. Or do you think it’s merely a coincidence that Soros has ties to over 30 major news organizations, including The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Post, NBC and ABC, and yet no one hears anything from those networks about his behind-the-scenes finagling and financing?

It fascinates me that Occupiers hate the rich cats unless they help finance their cause or rally at their sides, like George Soros and Michael Moore.

It prompts one to wonder: Why haven’t such power relations been reported by the MSM? And would they be so silent if the correlations were between such agents of control and the tea party?

For example, even with its liberal bent, Snopes.com just verified last Thursday that Vice President Joe Biden’s attorney son, Robert Hunter Biden, was retained for years to “undertake some lobbying efforts on behalf of Brookfield Office Properties,” which just happens to own Zuccotti Park in New York, where the Occupiers rally their national movement.

Snopes.com also verified that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s live-in girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, is on the board of directors of Brookfield Office Properties.

And just two months ago in September, the federal government’s Department of Energy guaranteed a stimulus “loan” of $168.9 million to Brookfield Asset Management, which is a parent company of Brookfield Office Properties.

But I’m sure those local and Washington governmental associations with Occupy Wall Street are all just coincidental and inconsequential, right?

(In Part 2, during Thanksgiving week, I’ll detail George Soros’ most recent covert “investment” in the 2012 Obama presidential campaign and detail much further his collective goal and master plan with the MSM and the White House itself.)

Chuck Norris

COPYRIGHT 2011 CHUCK NORRIS

About Chuck Norris:Action hero and Second Amendment activist, Chuck Norris is one of the most enduringly popular actors in the world. He has starred in more than 20 major motion pictures. His television series “Walker, Texas Ranger,” which completed its run in April 2001 after eight full seasons, is the most successful Saturday night series on CBS since “Gunsmoke.”In 2006, he added the title of columnist to his illustrious list of credits with the launch of his popular Internet column. Now Chuck is a regular contributor to AmmoLand, click the following link to See more of Chuck Norris on AmmoLand Shooting Sports News.

Filed under: Gun Rights News by Ammoland 1 Comment »