All Gun Deaths Are Equally Tragic?

Shall Not Be Questioned points to this posting at Gun Free Zone that checks the list of "gun violence victims" that Bloomberg's bunch is using as an argument for restrictive gun control laws:

Out of An NC Blog, I finally found the Slate list that the riders of the Yankee Vulture Bus use to read the names of people who dies of “gun violence.” Since it is a searchable database, I did a quick look for Miami and found some interesting things:

Eric Fussell: Shot in a car with companion Joshua Whack (also in the list) and according to the local NBC station “Whack had a lengthy criminal record, mostly for cocaine charges, dating back to 2004, according to court records. Fussell had been arrested previously on fraud, marijuana and cocaine charges, court records said.”

Remember, Bloomberg & Slate. are trying to sell you that they are doing this to save innocent victims, but they have no problem adding the name of veteran criminals to the list to pad it.
Dell Peter DiGiovanni: Suspect in a shootout with police as they were investigating drug trafficking and opened fire on the officers. Here is the rub: Dell Peter DiGiovanni hung himself. Must have used bullet rope or something like that.

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – A man believed to have been one of three people who got into a shoot out with police in front of a burning home in southwest Miami-Dade Tuesday night was found hanging from a tree.Wednesday afternoon, police confirmed that the body of 50-year old Dell Peter DiGiovanni hung himself on a tree in front of a home at SW 147 Avenue and SW 48 Terrace.'

Yes, the gun control crowd is remarkably careless about this sort of thing.   This paper over at SSRN by yours truly (and with the assistance of my research minions) examined the claims of the Violence Policy Center about "Concealed Carry Killers" and found that in some cases, licensees who were not even charged with a crime made their list.  Others included licensees who were killed by non-licensees, people who committed suicide in their own homes (where a license to carry is irrelevant), and in a few cases, people who were found innocent of criminal charges.

The gun control crowd has several enormous advantages on putting out this sort of careless propaganda:

1. The media are generally sympathetic to them -- although less so than twenty years ago.

2. The gun control crowd has people producing this stuff on a full-time, paid basis.  Our side relies almost entirely on volunteers.  Not surprisingly, the volume of the stuff they can produce is enormous.