Dr. John R. Lott on Why Gun Control Does Not Reduce Crime

 The Epoch Times "American Thought Leaders" recently looked into the question of whether gun control measures prevent crime or do they actually do the opposite.

In the below episode, Dr. John R. Lott breaks down the biggest misconceptions he sees around gun control, how media coverage skews people’s perceptions, and why he believes gun control measures will actually harm minorities and the most vulnerable.

Car Regulations vs Firearm Regulation

Yesterday, VSSA Executive Director Lu Charette forward this article from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) that points out traffic fatalities rose 7.7 percent last year and more than 35,000 people were killed, yet President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Congressional Democrats have not called for cracking down on car owners the way they do on gun owners.  It's one of the things you hear from the gun ban crowd from time to time that it's easier to get a gun than it is to drive a car.

CCRKBA is turning the gun ban lobby's argument back on them but as Dr. John Lott points out in his new book The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies, and earlier this month on Armed American Radio, the gun ban crowd compares apples to oranges in making the comparison between guns and cars because the majority of deaths involving automobiles are due to accidents/negligence.  Accidental/negligent deaths involving firearms are at all time lows and are around 500-600 per year.

John Lott: On Guns, Clinton Runs Both Right and Left

Dr. John Lott has a piece over at National Review Online, writing that Hillary Clinton is tailoring her message on guns to her audience. For instance:

On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton gave an address at Philadelphia’s St. Paul’s Baptist Church. With a nod to Pennsylvania’s high rate of gun ownership, she declared: “There is a Second Amendment, there are constitutional rights. We aren’t interested in taking away guns of lawful, responsible gun owners.”

But in New York City in the fall, she told donors: “The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment, and I am going to make that case every chance that I get.” In Maryland last Thursday, Chelsea Clinton reiterated that point, promising that her mom would appoint to the Supreme Court justices who would overturn past decisions that struck down local and state gun-control measures. Given that the only laws that the Supreme Court has objected to are complete gun bans or laws that made it a crime to chamber a bullet, one wonders what “constitutional rights” Clinton was talking about preserving in Philadelphia.

While this may be the case, gun owners should under no illusions about where she really stands. She has said as recently as last week that Americans own too many guns and she intends to change that.  That's the real Hillary Clinton.

John Lott: No, 90% Don't Want More Background Checks

Dr. John Lott has this piece over on the political page of Ingraham Media's LifeZette that does a pretty good job of debunking the gun ban lobby's oft repeated "90% of the public support universal background checks."  He uses things like the Washington State referendum that imposed background checks on all private sales to refute the claim.  For instance, after outspending opponents 50 to 1, the referendum only passed by 59%.  Yes, that is a sizable majority but it is well shy of 90%.

As for all those polls that the gun ban lobby cite for their talking points:

But these polls really ask little more than whether people want to stop criminals from obtaining guns. They don’t ask whether voters favor actual legislation that would actually impose background checks on the private transfer of guns.

It is a safe bet that if polls actually drilled down to who we would have to be doing background checks on in order to sell one of our privately owned firearms to a close friend, cousin, uncle, or neighbor, the poll results would not be anywhere close to 90%.

John Lott: Obama's Gun Control Order is Dicatorial and It Won't Work

Dr. John Lott has this article over at National Review Online:

The current law is very clear. Only federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct background checks, and only sellers whose “principal objective of livelihood and profit [is] the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms” are required to obtain a federal license. Anyone “who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms” is specifically exempted from the licensing requirement. 

But that doesn’t matter to Obama, whose actions today will require many sellers to get a license if they sell even a single gun. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told reporters that licenses would now be required based on such things as, “whether you sell firearms shortly after they’re acquired or whether you buy or sell in the original packaging.” 

In an era when private individuals can set up their cell phones to accept credit cards, accepting credit-card payment for one gun will now make selling firearms your “principal objective of livelihood.”

Lott goes on to note that Obama doesn't have to rewrite laws related to background checks to make meaningful reforms, including fixing the system so that it does not continuously flag people who have no prohibiting convictions.  The gun ban lobby routinely sites that the system has stopped over 2 million people from purchasing a firearm without telling the rest of the story.  The government hasn't prosecuted those 2 million people for attempting to buy a firearm when they supposedly could not because 94% of those people initially stopped were done so erroneously.

None of the things announced today would have stopped the handful of mass shootings that happened in 2015.  The president's own spokesperson has acknowledged as much.

Debunking the Violence Policy Center's Not So New Claims on Armed Self Defense

On Wednesday, the anti-rights Violence Policy Center trotted out what they call a "new" report that makes the claim gun owners rarely use firearms for self defense.  VPC based the report on FBI data on "justifiable homicides."  As the NRA and Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center pointed out however, this is just a recycled claim the anti-rights lobby has used for years.  Using justifiable homicides data is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is it totally discounts the fact that a number of people defend themselves with a firearm without ever firing a shot.  Lott also points out that only about 1 percent of police departments report justifiable homicides by police and it is even worse for civilian justifiable homicide.  To take it a step further, Dr. Lott noted that even for those states that do report such data, very few localities within those states actually compiled the numbers.

Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz have conducted a more reliable survey on the topic that can be found here.

 

 

Gun Ban Advocates Use Faulty Research to Push Gun Licensing

Representative Chris Van Hollen (D - MD) has introduced a new bill in Congress that would require states to enact handgun licensing schemes or face the loss of federal funding.  Van Hollen is using a new study by Daniel Webster and others from the Bloomberg funded Johns Hopkins "Center for Gun Policy and Research" as proof that such laws reduce crime committed with firearms.   From The Hill:

The Handgun Purchaser Licensing Act would zero in on handgun purchases, but exempt rifles and other types of firearms.

It is backed by a study from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research that found handgun licenses dramatically reduce homicide rates.

“Of the thousands of Americans murdered every single year by firearms, nearly 90 percent of those deaths occur with a handgun,” Van Hollen said. “With mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and friends dying every day because of guns, there is no question that gun violence is tearing at the fabric of our communities."

In addition to Van Hollen, who is running for the Senate, three Connecticut Democrats back the handgun bill: Rep. Elizabeth Esty, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Chris Murphy. Connecticut was the site of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in 2012.

Their bill would provide states with an incentive to strengthen their guns laws. States that follow through with the handgun regulations would receive federal funding to carry them out, while those that refused would risk losing money.

To qualify, states would have to implement laws that require prospective gun owners to apply for a firearms license from a local police station. They would be required to pass a background check, including submitting fingerprints and photographs.

Those who pass the background check would receive a firearms license that they must provide to purchase a handgun.

The Democrats say the handgun bill would help law enforcement officials weed out criminals and other people who are not allowed to purchase guns.

But Dr. John Lott points out Webster has cherry picked the data to support his conclusion:

Their results are also extremely sensitive to the last year that they pick.  While it is true that Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate fell by 40% from 1995 to 2005, it only fell by 16% between 1995 and 2006 and 12.5% between 1995 and 2010.  Meanwhile the drops for the US and the rest of the Northeast are much greater.  From 1995 and 2006, the firearm homicide rates for the US and the rest of the Northeast fell respectively by 27% and 22%.  From 1995 and 2010, the drops were 39% and 31%.  The longer samples show a relative increase in Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate whether Rudolph et al. had looked at one additional year or five additional years.

This is not the first time Webster has "cherry picked" data to support his preconceived conclusions.  He did the same thing in the Missouri study that was used with the Connecticut study to push the licensing scheme.

This is one more example that congress did the right thing prohibiting tax payer money to pay for research that pushes gun control.  Webster is a gun ban advocate and each of his studies start at the end he wants to achieve and then he finds the data to support those conclusions.

Obama's Gun Control Misfire

That's the title of an Op/Ed by Jason L. Riley of the Manhattan Institute that appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:

Last September the Obama administration produced an FBI report that said mass shooting attacks and deaths were up sharply—by an average annual rate of about 16% between 2000 and 2013. Moreover, the problem was worsening. “The findings establish an increasing frequency of incidents,” said the authors. “During the first 7 years included in the study, an average of 6.4 incidents occurred annually. In the last 7 years of the study, that average increased to 16.4 incidents annually.”

The White House could not possibly have been more pleased with the media reaction to these findings, which were prominently featured by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the Washington Post and other major outlets. The FBI report landed six weeks before the midterm elections, and the administration was hoping that the gun-control issue would help drive Democratic turnout.

Now comes word from the two academics at Texas State University who co-authored the FBI report, J. Pete Blair and M. Hunter Martaindale, that “our data is imperfect.”   But don't look for this news in the same outlets that carried the original report with such glee last year.  The authors made the admission in ACJS Today, an academic journal published by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.  Not really something that the average American picks up and reads on a daily basis.  The authors basically admit that because some of the data they needed did not exist, they basically made it up:

“Because official data did not contain the information we needed, we had to develop our own,” (emphasis added) wrote Messrs. Blair and Martaindale. “This required choices between various options with various strengths and weaknesses.”

Dr. John Lott told Riley that the 2014 FBI report is best viewed as a "political document" rather than a serious work of social science because the data used appears to have been "selectively chosen" to achieve certain results. 

Remember, this is the FBI, the same agency some want to take on the work of a shut down ATF.  No thanks.

Is Crime Committed with Firearms "Spiraling Upward"?

Heather Mac Donald authored this Wall Street Journal Op/Ed over the weekend that starts:

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

Dr. John Lott took exception to her claim on the Crime Prevention Research Center's web site and states Mac Donald's choice of words amounted to trying to scare the nation about crime.  Lott goes on to post the numbers for the nation's 15 largest cities as well as links to data for Baltimore and DC then notes:

The bottom line is that across the largest 15 cities in the US the murder rate has fallen by 43 from 871 to 828, a 5% drop.

I heard Ms. Mac Donald when she appeared on Bill Bennett's early morning talk show today to discuss her article.  In that interview she barely mentioned the part of about "spiraling gun crime" and focused on the article's larger point, that the polices of the Obama Administration and former AG Eric Holder have caused police to do their job differently, with negative effects:

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

This has caused what is known as the Ferguson effect:

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

“Any cop who uses his gun now has to worry about being indicted and losing his job and family,” a New York City officer tells me. “Everything has the potential to be recorded. A lot of cops feel that the climate for the next couple of years is going to be nonstop protests.”

The point of her article was that policies being pushed by the left (and from some on the right) like decriminalization and deincarceration may have dire consequences, especially for those they are supposed to be benefiting, if they backfire.  She probably could have made the same point without the sensational comment about a "spiraling" increase in gun related crime.

Bloomberg View Again Pushing Myth of No Gun Research

The editors of BloombergView have once again trotted out the myth that the NRA has stymied gun related research over the last 20 years.

For two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been prohibited by Congress from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” (The National Institutes of Health faces a similar restriction.) Now there are signs the medical profession is getting fed up. In the April 7 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine is an editorial calling on physicians to demand the “resources and freedom” to do their jobs: reducing harm. Specifically, the journal calls for an end to the political blockade on research about the health effects of gun violence. 

I will give them credit for admitting the thesis of their article is not entirely true.

Not all research has been extinguished. Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of California at Davis are among the institutions that have produced notable studies in recent years. The National Institute of Justice has made limited forays into studying the criminal use of guns. But given the scope of the issue -- more than 30,000 firearm deaths and tens of thousands of injuries annually -- foundation grants and a bare trickle of government research can do only so much to advance understanding.

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, firearm related research has been as plentiful now as it was in the past.

There is no evidence that gun control research fell when restrictions were put on federally funded research. Indeed, whether one looks at the number of total articles or total pages, firearms research has been as high or higher than when the restrictions were enacted. In 2013, well before federal funding could have any impact on publications, there was an explosion in firearms research in medical journals.

As Dr. Lott has pointed out, there has been no ban on firearm related research, just a ban on using available funds for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advocate or promote gun control.  If that prohibition is responsible for the CDC not doing firearm related research now, doesn't that lead us to the conclusion their past research was for advocacy purposes?

Dr. John Lott Responds to "More Guns, More Crime"

In a November 25 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Dr. John R. Lott, Lloyd Cohen, professor, George Mason University School of Law, and Carl Moody, professor, College of William and Mary Department of Economics, responded to Christopher Ingraham’s “More Guns, More Crime” Wonkblog post that appeared on the Washington Post web site in mid-November, and discussed here.  In that post Ingraham reported on a "slightly updated paper" by law professor John Donohue and two graduate students that purported to show that by adding additional data to a previous study, their research shows that concealed carry laws actually increased crime on states with such laws.  Lott and his colleagues disagreed by pointing out:

Their revised paper’s “preferred” results supposedly show violent crime rates increase after states pass right-to-carry laws. Among the problems: 

— They rely, without explanation, on estimates Mr. Donohue has previously claimed were unreliable and misleading. Measuring simply the average crime rates before and after the law can miss an upward trend in crime before the law and drops afterwards.

— They focus on the period from 1999 to 2010. But later-adopting states were often reluctantly dragged into passing these laws. Their laws were more restrictive — higher fees, longer training requirements and more gun-free zones. The authors compare the drop in violent crime for these late adopters with other states — primarily earlier adopters who issued many more permits — who experienced larger drops in crime. But smaller drops for more restrictive states is exactly what the “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis predicts.

— Even relying on these flawed estimates, Mr. Ingraham ignored that most of the authors’ results still provide no evidence that violent crime increases.

On Monday, Lott spoke in more detail with Cam Edwards on NRANews' Cam and Company where he discussed not only the letter to the editor but the flaws in the Donohue paper.

Washington Post More Guns Equal More Crime Blog Post Misses Important Facts

Last weekend, Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post's Wonkblog had this post reporting on a September piece by Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues that purports to discredit Dr. John Lott's work More Guns Less Crime. That in and of itself is not new. A number of anti-rights academics have sought to show Lott's work is flawed since it was first published.  According to Wonk Blog, Donohue has added another decade of data to support their thesis:

Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard's original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime.

"The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws.

On Sunday, Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center had a post pointing out where Ingraham is wrong. The post notes that Lott had already used the additional data in his most recent updated edition of More Guns Less Crime:

There are many errors in Ingraham’s article.  For example, “Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis.”  Yet, the third edition of “More Guns, Less Crime” has data from 1977 to 2005.  Moody, Marvell, Zimmerman, and Alemante have a new paper earlier this year that looked at data from 1977 to 2006.  Gius (2014) looked at data up through 2009.  Zimmerman (2014) looks at crime data up through 2010.   Previously even in the Washington Post, Emily Badger’s misleading column also discussed an earlier version of Donohue’s paper with data through 2006 (7/29).

And, CPRC even used a graph from the 3rd Edition of More Guns Less Crime that uses the very data that Donohue says should be used, the way they say it should be used.

So you tell me, do more guns equal more crime?

Guns, Crime, and Bloomberg's Lies

Last week, Dr. John Lott and Fox News' John Stossel discussed the myth that crime committed with a firearm is increasing and other lies that Bloomberg and his affiliated groups spread.

NPR Touts Taxpayer Funded Research as Way to "Counter Gun Violence"

For almost 20 years, the gun ban lobby has complained that the NRA has shut down funding for so-called "gun violence research" that would supposedly give us the data we need to reduce crime committed with a firearm.  NPR reports this morning that taxpayer money has started flowing again to such activity:

...But to start with, the CDC has begun offering more than $7 million in grants to states to expand the agency's National Violent Death Reporting System. The hope is that will also capture more data on firearm fatalities.

While the taxpayers may not have been funding research, that doesn't mean there hasn't been any research.  Dr. John Lott released a study on the subject in February of 2014 and noted:

There is no evidence that gun control research fell when restrictions were put on federally funded research. Indeed, whether one looks at the number of total articles or total pages, firearms research has been as high or higher than when the restrictions were enacted. In 2013, well before federal funding could have any impact on publications, there was an explosion in firearms research in medical journals.

Unfortunately, when the taxpayers fund research, the money goes to support data that leads to gun ban proposals.