PolitiFact: Gun group’s claim about church violence can’t be verified
This article was edited for length. To see a complete version and its sources, go to www.politifact.con/georgia/.
More than 440 people have been killed in attacks on church property since 1999.
Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.org, told Georgia Public Broadcasting
It’s been a month since House Bill 60 became law and cleared the way for Georgians to carry concealed weapons in several new venues — all bars, many government buildings and, generating the most news coverage, churches that allow it.
Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.org — a group that advocates for fewer gun restrictions — repeated a strikingly high and somewhat specific number in defending the allowance of guns in sanctuaries.
More than 440 people have been killed in attacks on church property since 1999, he told Georgia Public Broadcasting this spring.
A reader questioned that figure. We decided it was a worthy target for the AJC Truth-O-Meter.
Already, PolitiFact has found flaws in a specific count from the other side of the gun debate. Everytown for Gun Safety claimed there were 74 school shootings in the United States since Sandy Hook. We rated that claim Mostly False.
Henry told PolitiFact Georgia that he relied on two specific websites, www.CopandCross.org and www.CarlChinn.com, for the statistic. He used the term church generically to cover all houses of worship.
Cop and Cross is run by Jimmy Meeks, a former police officer who teaches church safety across the country. A recent banner on the site listed more than 470 “violent deaths on church and faith-based property since 1999,” but it does not include sources for those figures.
Instead, it directs users to the site run by Carl Chinn, a former building engineer for Focus on the Family. Chinn was among responders when a gunman in 1996 took four people hostage at the group’s headquarters and later surrendered.
Chinn said in an email that he relies on news reports, official records and blog items for his figures.
That count includes broad incidents not likely to be considered attacks. The first page of incidents for 2014 shows at least two suicides on church property that are not connected to the house of worship.
GeorgiaCarry.org’s claim could also not be backed up with unimpeachable data elsewhere. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the majority of the 166 deaths that occurred at houses of worship between 2003 and 2011 were suicides.
But the National Violent Death Reporting System covers only 17 states, including Georgia. The CDC could not provide specific numbers on suicides from the total figure.
That means the figures are not nationally representative and cannot be used to create an estimate to verify or refute Chinn’s numbers.
There is similarly incomplete coverage from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, with only about 38 percent of Uniform Crime Reporting agencies providing information, according to the FBI.
The federal government has generally stopped funding such research over political battles between gun control advocates and gun rights advocates.
Several prominent social scientists have asked that barriers to firearms research be lifted. President Barack Obama has signed an executive order for the CDC to research causes and prevention of gun violence.
Without reliable statistics, Chinn’s data could be the best approximation of information available. And although advocates often speak with more certainty than data support, David Kopel, the research director at the Libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, said there is value in stories behind some of the numbers.
Anecdotally, backers of Georgia’s law need only to point to Matthew Murray, who killed two missionaries in a Colorado church’s mission training center in 2007, Kopel said.
Murray continued his spree by killing two more people at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. A congregant volunteering to help with security shot Murray, who then took his own life.
There have been incidents closer to home. In July 2012, two people were killed in a shootout with each other outside a funeral at Victory for the World Church near Stone Mountain.
In October of that year, Floyd Palmer gunned down Greg McDowell as he led a prayer at World Changers Church International in College Park. Palmer also was charged in 2001 with shooting a man outside a Maryland mosque.
The data have some value in capturing the number of attacks on or at religious institutions. But there is no way to remove suicides from the death counts to ensure a more strict definition of attacks as understood by the general public.
The claim contains some truth, but it gives the wrong impression.
We rate it Mostly False.
