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Why Not Kick John Lott Around Again?

November 16, 2022

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              Several years ago, an energetic journalist, Mike Spies, wrote a long and detailed article about financial mismanagement at the NRA which almost cut America’s ‘oldest civil rights organization’ down at the knees. The organization survived but the research by Spies may have cost the gun-rights group to lose more than $50 million in annual dues.

              Spies has recently published another detailed piece of research, this time aiming at John Lott, a self-employed economist whose pro-gun work has, according to Spies, “provided the empirical justification for looser firearms laws.” In particular, Lott has testified before legislative committees which have crafted ‘stand your ground’ and concealed-carry laws, he has also submitted documentation in courtroom cases, including a recent California case where the judge cited Lott’s work as the basis for overturning the state’s assault-rifle ban.

              Lott’s fundamental work is a book, More Guns, Less Crime, published by the prestigious University of Chicago Press. The book was initially published in 1998, has gone through multiple editions, and is regularly cited by just about every pro-gun politician and advocate promoting the easing of regulatory constraints of guns.

              Although the book is chock-full of data, as well as endless statistical analysis, Lott’s argument is rather simple insofar as he finds a positive correlation between the issuance of concealed-carry licenses in various states and a consequent drop in violent crime (murder and assaults) in those same states. He also finds an increase in covert crime (burglary) in most of those same states.

              Putting the data together, Lott argues that when criminals believe their intended crime victims may be armed, they switch to crimes in which there is no human element to concern them. Which means that what we get is a society which as it becomes more armed, is also a safer society in which to live.

              Lott’s argument is one of a number of attempts to explain the rather remarkable 50% drop in violent crime which occurred in the United States beginning in the early 1990’s, coincident with the increase in concealed-carry licenses where 16 states automatically issued concealed-carry licenses in 1992, a number which increased to 30 states by 1998.

              In the interests as they say of full disclosure, I must state that Lott and I are good friends and I support his research because he is the one scholar doing work on gun violence who has actually gone out and created an original data collection by tracking the issuance of concealed-carry licenses in every state. His critics in the gun-control scholarly community invariably rely on secondary data sources and I am one of these old-fashioned scholars who believes that an important role of research is to identify and promote primary resources on which to base research.

              I also happen to disagree with Lott’s argument about criminals switching from personal to non-personal criminality because they fear that their victims may be armed, for the simple reason that his argument assumes that we are talking about the same criminals who switch their criminal modus operandi because they believe that the ‘good guys’ are now walking around with guns.  The fact that Lott finds a coincidental shift in criminality and licensing doesn’t necessarily mean that we have any kind of cause and effect.

              By the same token, however, I am even less impressed by the work of Lott’s critics who take him to task either by creating statistical models which produce different results simply by changing the statistical parameters whether such changes bear any relationship to reality at all (Donahue) or the regression analysis which finds that the United States has such a high level of violent criminality because Americans own so many guns (Hemenway). Since violent crimes are overwhelmingly committed with the use of illegal guns, what difference does it make if we have hundreds of millions of legal guns floating around?

              The issue which neither Mike Spies nor anyone else in the gun-control research/journalist community has yet to explore is why we continue to debate and (on rare occasion) pass laws which only further regulate the behavior of lawful gun owners who relatively rarely show up as the individuals annually committing 100,000 criminal assaults with guns?

              And this number of gun crimes is probably way below what the real number happens to be, for the simple reason that lots of gun assaults occur with nobody getting injured or killed. And I am still waiting for the first gun-control researcher to even acknowledge that we have absolutely no idea how many guns are carried around every day for no lawful purpose at all.

Attacking John Lott Doesn’t Explain Gun Violence.

July 23, 2019

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              If there is one person more disliked than anyone by Gun-control Nation, that person has to be John Lott. His book, More Guns, Less Crime, is considered the single, most important reason behind Gun-nut Nation’s embrace of armed, self-defense, and his ongoing effort to eliminate gun-free zones provokes anger and negative reactions throughout gun-control land.is book, More Guns

              In fact, at least one noted gun-control researcher, Stanford’s John Donohue, has basically created an entire academic career based on articles critical of Lott. Not far behind Donahue is the chief of gun research at Harvard, David Hemenway, who has likewise published multiple denunciations of Lott’s work.

              I happen to believe that the attacks on Lott’s work reflect the failure of liberal social science to explain what is really the only issue in the entire gun debate which needs to be understood, namely, how is it that less than ten percent of the individuals who each year commit a serious act of violence against someone else commit this violence by using a gun? John Lott’s basic thesis, that criminals switch from face-to-face crimes (assault) to anonymous crimes (burglary) is an attempt to explain the behavior which lies behind at least three-quarters of all gun injuries. Have either Donahue or Hemenway ever attempted any explanation of this problem? They have not.

              I have two criticisms of Lott’s work. First, the idea that criminals switch from one type of crime to another type of crime assumes that one type (assault) is really no different from another type (burglary), and that criminals switch their modus operandi depending on how they perceive degrees of risk from different types of criminal behavior. This assumption flies in the face of everything we know about criminal behavior and to argue, a la Lott, that the issuance of concealed-carry licenses (CCW) creates a ‘substitution effect’ for burglary versus assault, is to misread the nature of how and why these very different types of crimes occur.

              Second, and more important is the fact that most of the perpetrators and victims of gun violence are individuals who share similar socio-economic circumstances and demographic profiles. Both groups are overwhelmingly minority males living in under-served neighborhoods who rarely, if ever qualify for concealed-carry licenses, an argument Lott has made in other works. If the average inner-city resident is more frequently armed than years ago, this simply cannot be explained with reference to the spread of CCW over the past forty years.

              For all the sturm und drang whipped up by Donohue, Hemenway and others about the pernicious impact of Lott’s research, I have yet to see one, single response to his work which even hints at the issues I have raised above. It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to sit down, pull some numbers together and create a regression analysis model that will yield a result which aligns with your particular point of view. Want to argue, as Hemenway argues, that we have high rates of fatal gun injuries because we own so many guns? Use the number of guns as your independent variable to control against fatal gun injuries and the United States will wind up on top every, single time. Now the fact that we have absolutely no idea how many of those 300 million guns are in the hands of people who might use those guns to commit a violent crime, oh well, oh well, oh well.

              I think my friends in public health gun research need to stop confusing research with hot air. God knows we have enough of the latter on both sides of the gun debate; it’s the former where most of the necessary work remains totally undone. Gun injuries are the only injury tracked by the CDC where the person who is injured and the person who commits the injury are two different people at least seventy-five percent of the time. I’m still waiting for anyone in the public health research community to ask why this fundamental fact escapes their research.

Mike The Gun Guy Goes On Trial.

July 8, 2019

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              On Friday, July 19, I am going to be a defendant on trial in Las Vegas; I can only hope I will be found innocent of all charges and allowed to go free. The main charge against me is that I am against the 2nd Amendment, and the prosecutor is none other than the ‘hated’ John Lott. There will be a judge, there will be a jury and I suspect that when the trial comes to an end, I’ll be found guilty as charged.

              The event is actually taking place at the Paris Hotel and Casino, and it is a featured presentation of this year’s FreedomFest, billed as a conference where “free minds meet to celebrate ‘great books, great ideas and great thinkers’ in an open-minded environment.” If you haven’t figured it out yet, FreedomFest is the libertarian equivalent of TED or Aspen, a place where folks can learn about one important issue or another while really getting together to cut a deal.

              This isn’t the first time I’ve shot my mouth off before a pro-gun group, nor is it the first time I’ve had a public debate with the ‘hated’ John Lott. Increasingly, I go out of my way and will even endure a crummy, five-hour plane ride if I get a chance to say what I have to say before a group which fervently believes in 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ After all, why would I want to fly out to Seattle to appear before a meeting of Grandmothers Against Guns?  I love how some of my friends who do public health research on gun violence will only speak in front of gun-control groups. What’s the point of that?

              There are also some folks in Gun-control Nation who are so childishly screwed up that they attack me for being a renegade, a turncoat, a troublemaker and a not-so-secret NRA partisan by appearing on the same stage as the ‘hated’ John Lott. After all, as a good friend who happens to be a leading public health scholar once lectured me, “You’re just giving him credibility which he doesn’t deserve.”

              I am not only pleased to be invited to talk at FreedomFest, I’m hoping that my appearance will lead to more speaking invitations from like-minded groups. And if those appearances involve sharing the stage with John Lott, just as well. When John appears before a meeting of the Federalist Society or some other politically-conservative group, he’s not converting a single person in the audience to his point of view. On the other hand, when I talk at a get-together sponsored by the NRA (and since I’m an Endowment Patriot Life member they can’t kick me out no matter what) someone always comes up, thanks me for coming and says, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard what you had to say.”

              To my friends in Gun-control Nation, we’re not going to challenge America’s gun culture by talking to the folks on our own side. We’re not going to convince the majority of Americans who currently believe that a gun protects them from crime, by telling them about some public health study which shows the idea to be untrue. The last time that Gallup asked whether a gun made a home more or less safe, the ‘more’ outnumbered the ‘less’ by two to one, and 79% of gun owners told Pew that having a gun makes them feel safer than not.

              I happen to disagree with these views. I have watched more than 7,000 people run through a live-fire drill on my range and even with some practice now and again, hardly any of these folks would ever be able to protect themselves with a gun. When I talk to a gun-rights group and tell them to find other ways to deal with the fears which drive them to buy and own guns, I’m telling them something they won’t hear from John Lott.

              Gun-control Nation should spend a little more time thinking about why the ‘other side’ clings to their guns and a little less time promoting their self-righteous beliefs.

If anyone is terribly offended by what I just said, they can have all the space they want on my blog to reply in kind.

Why Does Everyone Hate John Lott?

June 13, 2018

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I have just posted a detailed paper on SSRN with the above title and it is available for download right here.  This paper is an attempt not to exonerate Lott for any of his shortcomings, nor to play devil’s advocate for what he says or writes, and certainly not to push some backdoor kind of support for his work. I have previously written about him and by just mentioning his name without adding the usual gun violence prevention (GVP) sobriquet like the ‘discredited’ or ‘dangerous’ John Lott I have been accused not only of being his partner, but also of being a secret mole for the NRA.

People who make comment like that without bothering to read what I actually have said about Lott’s work are doing their best to make sure that no common ground between gun owners and non-gun owners will ever exist. What? Am I saying that the GVP isn’t interested in finding ways to communicate with ‘responsible’ gun owners who will support ‘reasonable’ policies to regulate guns? No. What I’m saying is that the gun-control community never refers to themselves as being ‘responsible;’ it’s always the other side which needs to meet some kind of responsibility test. And funny, when pro-GVP scholars ask gun owners what kinds of ‘reasonable’ public policies they would support, the list always seems to start and end with policies which reflect what GVP advocates feel should be supported, and never policies advocated by the other side.

This may come as a great shock to my GVP friends, but while there is clearly strong support among gun owners for background checks and the like, I’m willing to bet that if you asked the average gun owner what he’s doing to reduce gun violence, there’s a good chance he’ll tell you that he keeps a loaded handgun by his side. It may be kept at home, it may be dangling from his belt, but since more than 60% of Americans believe that a gun makes you safer than not having a gun, then the gun owner who tells you that the best way to protect yourself from violence is by owning a gun isn’t just whistling in the dark. And since guns are apparently found in only 40% of all American homes, this means that a lot of non-gun owners buy the ‘gun makes you safer’ line as well.

Lott’s an easy target because anyone who makes an occasional appearance on Fox or is interviewed by an AM talk-show jock is, by definition, an enemy of the folks who care about reducing the carnage America suffers from guns. But Lott has never (read: never) said anything about the extraordinary cultural shift which has moved us from 60% supporting a total handgun ban in 1960 to the current number which is below 25%. By the time Lott wrote his first paper, only one in three Americans supported a handgun ban, so Lott was able to capitalize on this shift in public opinion, but he didn’t make it up.

What we are looking at is an extraordinary case of cognitive dissonance in which the people who decide they need a gun to protect them, particularly if they want to walk around toting the damn thing, happen to be the people least likely to ever be victims of violent crime. Several years ago I was at a gun show in Lancaster, PA, which is a nice farming town about 60 miles due west of the Liberty Bell. Pennsylvania had just changed their right to carry (RTC) law from ‘may issue’ to ‘shall issue,’ and the sheriff’s office in Lancaster was overwhelmed with folks wanting to apply for their license to carry a gun. I happened to overhear several guys talking who had just spent four hours waiting on line, and when one of them laughed and said, “Well, there’s never any crime out here anyway,” the other responded in a very serious tone, “Yea, but they could come out from  Philly. You never know.”

What my paper really talks about is what we need to understand about this cultural shift in attitudes towards guns and how we need to incorporate this shift into the public narrative promoted by the GVP. Because we can sit around all day and shoot verbal arrows at John Lott but so what? The bottom line is that too many Americans have decided that the only thing between them and mayhem is owning and carrying a gun. The fact that their decision results in more mayhem somehow escapes from being said.

And despite what you may think, you simply can’t blame that attitude on John Lott.

 

Do Guns Make It Easier Or Harder To Commit Crimes? Donohue Versus Lott.

March 18, 2018

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In the wake of a massive, unprecedented social media campaign by a bunch of high school kids, all of a sudden the gun industry finds itself facing a storm of protests over whether or not its products should be made or sold. Well, maybe not all of its products, but certainly the products whose use continues to produce enough multiple killings and injuries to ignite a debate about whether such guns should be around at all.

lott2Behind the argument about owning high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons is another debate which has been going on for nearly 20 years about what I call the social utility of guns, namely, do guns make us more or less safe, or to put it another way, do guns protect us from crime or increase crime?

This debate got started in 1998 with the publication of John Lott’s book, More Guns Less Crime, the title of which says what the book is all about. One of the early reviews of this book was by an academic, John Donohue, who also collaborated with Steven Levitt on a controversial study linking legal abortions to the post-1990’s decline in crime.

Over the years, Lott’s book has become something of a Holy Grail to the gun-rights movement, Donohue’s multliple critiques of this book serving in the same fashion for the gun violence prevention crowd, a.k.a, the GVP.

What I have always found interesting in this debate is the degree to which the criticisms of both Lott and Donohue flow directly from where the critics stand on the issue of guns. I have yet to read a single critique of Lott’s book by anyone who considers themselves to be a proponent of guns. Ditto, I have never found a single critique of Donohue’s work emanating from anyone who supports more controls over guns.  In other words, what we have here is an academic argument in which neither side can find a single, critical word to utter about the work with whose conclusions they agree.

This isn’t an academic debate. Frankly, it’s  nothing more than the same, old, tired and hackneyed argument about guns that has been going on for more than twenty years. It’s not driven by evidence-based work, it’s driven by emotions and advocacy that both sides always make.

What you can download here is a detailed paper I have posted on SSRN.  It is not an attempt to prove that Lott is correct and Donohue isn’t, nor the other way around. It is also not an attempt to come up with yet another statistical model which can be used to provide yet another regression analysis linking crime rates to guns.

Frankly, I have absolutely no interest in proving either Donohue or Lott to be correct. My interest is simply to take this long-standing, academic argument and look at it from the only perspective that really counts, and that perspective happens to be what I know about guns.  Which is something that neither Donohue nor Lott know very much at all.

All Of A Sudden, Talking Nicely About Gun Violence Is ‘In.’

June 20, 2017

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If Alex Jones was really the conspiracy expert which he claims to be, instead of just huckstering to the crowd that believes the aliens landed in Area 51, he would take a look at the way in which Gun-nut Nation develops and puts out its messaging, because he would discover that it starts and ends at the same place.  And that place happens to be the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where Donald ‘I could shoot someone in the street’ Trump is trying to change his tune on violence and guns.

nugent             I said last week that Trump’s muted and respectful response to the shooting of Steve Scalise and others represented an awareness that his dwindling base doesn’t provide enough traction to get his political agenda through Congress, never mind keep him from getting burned by Russiagate.  And his foolish attempt to promote himself by posting a tweet about a Rasmussen 50% score, a poll result which went south the very next day, can’t hide the fact that unless he starts appealing to folks outside of his crazy base, he’s all done.

So now it’s almost a week since the ‘good guys’ with guns in Alexandria turned out to be cops instead of civilians, but that didn’t stop John Lott from going on a right-wing noise-making radio show and saying how important it was to have people with guns on the scene. And it really doesn’t matter whether those guns belong to cops who may actually be trained to use lethal defense, or belong to civilians who aren’t required to undergo any training at all.  And if the gun is in the hands of a ‘good guy,’ then everything’s going to be okay. I know, it’s as dumb as you can get.

But when it comes to real dumbness, this week’s award has to go to none other than Ted Nugent, who figured out how to prolong his career by creating a new standard for saying dumb and stupid things about violence and guns. And I don’t mean a high standard because here’s a guy who’s so friggin’ dumb that he posted pictures of gun-control politicians on his Facebook page, all of whom happened to be Jewish, adorned each pic with an Israeli flag, and then claimed he didn’t ‘know’ that something so tasteless would be taken as an anti-Semitic slur.

Anyway, this jackass has now publicly disowned every hateful and nasty remark he ever made, and has promised to tone down his remarks, become ‘more respectful to the other side,’ and if “it gets fiery, if it gets hateful, I’m going away.” What? The man who told Obama to suck his you-know-what is pulling back from the rhetorical venom which Trump imitated again and again during the 2016 campaign?

This can only be happening because the alt-right has realized that since they now own the White House, that their brand of hate won’t sell.  Oh, it will still sell to the ‘make America great again’ crowd that will line up at Trump rallies and buy the hats and other overpriced paraphernalia which generates revenues for the Trump Organization bottom line. But that’s not going to work with the rest of us, and it’s the rest of us who will ultimately determine whether Trump keeps his job or not.

So now we have a report that Chris Collins (R-NY) whose announcement that he will always go around with his gun marks him as one of the dopiest schmucks in the U. S. House, is now crafting a bill to protect lawmakers from getting shot, and he’s doing it with help from the NRA. Perfect, just perfect. The NRA, which wants no restrictions of any kind on concealed-carry, is going to help write legislation that will make it easier for jerks like Rep. Collins to walk around DC with a gun. But this is a ‘responsible’ way to react to a mass shooting, right? And ‘responsible’ is now what Donald Trump is all about.

John Lott Talks About Guns And Gets It Wrong – Again.

May 10, 2017

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My eye caught an op-ed the other in The Hill which is so rife with claims that are simply untruthful or wrong that I just needed to punch out a quick reply. And since I write about guns and I’m saying that someone else who writes about guns is saying things which aren’t accurate or true, obviously I’m talking about my good buddy, John Lott.

 

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John Lott

John has been on this kick for several years about how Democrats discriminate against minorities because they support the idea that big-city residents have difficulty getting licenses to purchase and/or carry guns.  It may come as a shock to John who lives in a nice, suburban town that is 85% white, but in fact the majority of city-dwellers throughout the United States happen to be white. They also happen to be middle class, so for John to say that excessive gun license fees show that Democrats (who usually support higher gun fees) discriminate against minorities and the poor is simply a typical example of how he often gets it wrong.

But what really grabbed my attention was his statement about the concealed-carry licensing procedure in Texas, which he claims has ‘more stringent mandatory training requirements’ than many other states. I’ll let you in on a little secret – I don’t believe that John Lott actually owns a gun. Or if he does own one, I can tell you that it’s been sitting on some shelf in a closet because this is a guy who talks about guns using verbiage that makes no sense.

First of all, Texas doesn’t have a ‘mandatory training requirement;’ in fact, the Lone Star State doesn’t have any training requirement at all. Nor for that matter does any other state. What Texas has is a one-time proficiency test which must be conducted as part of the licensing process and basically requires that the applicant prove that he or she has the ability to hit the broad side of a barn; in this case the barn being a B-27 target, which is the standard torso target used by most law enforcement agencies when the officers go to the range.

The proficiency test is based on a total score derived from where 50 rounds hit the target – the closer to the center of the target, the higher the score.  Some of the shooting is also timed with the shooter having to discharge the gun with several seconds allowed for each shot. A passing grade is 175 out of a maximum of 250 and the shooting is done at distances of 3, 7 and 15 yards.

This test is about as stringent as the diet I went on last night before I sat down to watch a Netflix movie with a big bowl of ice cream. First of all, the shooter doesn’t have to first pull the gun out of a holster so the timed shoots begin with the first shot. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall seeing anyone even in an open-carry state walking down the street with his gun pointed in front of him waiting for a target to appear. And the minimum passing score can be met by only hitting the outside target ring which in real life would mean that the bullet wouldn’t strike anyone’s body at all.

In other words, the proficiency test for getting a carry-concealed license in Texas is bullsh*t.  It’s a joke. Not only doesn’t the test show whether someone can shoot a gun accurately, but it doesn’t replicate to any degree a situation which might occur if someone actually had to use the damn gun.

John Lott has been promoting armed citizens as the first line of defense against crime for twenty years. Buffoons like Ted Nugent may take his research seriously, but when it comes to concealed-carry from a practical point of view, anyone who thinks that the Texas licensing process validates that someone knows how to use a gun for self-defense better hope they never need to use their gun for anything but fun.

It’s Not Just Gun Sales That Matter, It’s The Argument Behind The Guns.

April 4, 2017

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The FBI just released its figures for NICS background checks processed in March, and the number of background checks for gun transactions, as opposed to gun licenses, has swung slightly back up.  This information, of course, has unleashed paroxysms of joy in Gun-nut Nation, because everyone has been saying that gun sales will continue to slip during the Age of Trump. Now one month’s sales don’t really tell you all that much, particularly since I suspect that many of those sales represented consumers taking advantage of price cuts by gun retailers who have to move unsold inventory off their shelves.

 

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John Lott

To me, the much more important impact of the Trump election is not the impact on sales, but the degree to which his pro-gun stance alters the basic narrative about the value and importance of guns. Because let’s not forget that the NRA and the other purveyors of guns as the all-American item of choice were able to promote gun sales primarily by arguing, with some degree of truthfulness by the way, that a guy like Obama in the White House meant that guns might be taken away.  And the same argument was used against Hillary’s Presidential bid and the same arguments about alleged ‘threats’ to 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ have been used to spur gun sales over the last twenty or thirty years.

But now the NRA is hoisted by its own petard, because you can accuse the Trump administration of all kinds of things, but one of the things you can’t accuse them of being is against guns. And just today our friends at The Trace posted a quick analysis of the views of incoming Justice Department attorneys, and all of them are decidedly (and somewhat stupidly) very pro-gun.

A secondary theme supporting the idea of a gun in every garage is the notion that we need all the protection we can get in an age when terrorists can penetrate the country as quickly as a new strain of the flu, and can or will mount deadly attacks wherever and whenever they please. But this argument also falls flat in the face of constant bromides from Herr Trump about how he’s going to keep us all safe. After all, if the new, tough Trump government is going all-out to protect us from harm, how can one argue that we should be concerned about personal protection at all?

So if the pro-gun narrative that preceded Trump is no longer working, what happens to the people and organizations whose mission is to spread that narrative every chance they get? I’m thinking, for example, about the fortunes of my good friend John Lott, whose books and lectures on the value of guns to protect us from violent crime has made him a visible media personality on shock-jock radio and FOX.

John runs something called the Crime Prevention Research Center, basically a home-grown website devoted to spreading his version of gun information far and wide. Actually, the site is an advertisement for his media appearances and public speeches; the truth is that John is an advocate much more than a researcher – I don’t recall the last time he actually published peer-reviewed research unless the definition of ‘research’ includes any time that someone opens their mouth.

The website and John’s advocacy activities are funded by donations from loyal supporters but the revenue levels recently haven’t done so well.  In 2013 the CPRC brought in $218,106, the following year donations zoomed upwards to $310,839, and then they dropped in 2015 to $166,736.  I don’t see the 2016 numbers but I did see an interesting comment from those idiots Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership site, who quoted an email fundraising appeal from Lott: “Unfortunately, the CPRC is literally almost out of money.  Donations have fallen off dramatically since the election.”

Gee, what a surprise. Gun-nut Nation doesn’t have to worry about losing their toys so support for pro-gun noisemakers like Lott immediately dry up. Will the same situation also begin to impact the NRA?

Why Do Americans Stand Their Ground? Because The Law Says We Can.

January 19, 2017

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Last September I reviewed Caroline Light’s book, Stand Your Ground, and said it was a must-read.  The book is now about to be published, so I thought I would go back and discuss what I didn’t cover in my previous review.  Last time I discussed the major theme of the book, which is how and why America departed from the British, common-law tradition of retreating in the face of a direct threat and replaced it with laws which basically sanction the use of homicidal force in just about any kind of direct confrontation that might occur.  And what’s the most efficient way to respond to a real or imagined threat? We all know the answer to that.

laws           This time, however, I want to look at the issue which is somewhat tangential to Professor Light’s primary concern, but nevertheless must be addressed. At the same time that states began passing SYG laws, they also began easing restrictions on the ability of citizens to walk around with guns, two legal developments that are promoted vigorously by Gun-nut Nation, and which may set the legislative gun agenda on Capitol Hill in the Age of Trump.

For SYG and CCW the argument in favor goes like this: gun-owners are extremely law-abiding, people with concealed-carry permits even more so, bad guys will always try to avoid a criminal situation where their victim might be armed, hence, the armed citizen protects society from crime.  The NRA has been peddling this formula for more than twenty years, they trot it out every time an act of gun violence occurs in places where citizens should be able to carry guns (schools, airports, etc.) and Trump vigorously promoted this nonsense at every opportunity during the campaign.

But what if it’s not nonsense?  What if the end result of people walking around with guns is no real increase in gun-violence?  In that case, what difference would it make if a bunch of children masquerading as adults want to pretend they can behave like citizen-protectors and use their guns to shoot the bad guys and reduce our risk of harm?  The problem is that the evidence on the value of people carrying guns and playing cops and robbers is ambiguous, if not wholly incorrect, but the counter-argument, that the presence of armed citizens increases the risk of gun violence is also not a proven fact.

On the pro-gun side we have, as always, the works of Gary Kleck and John Lott. On the basis of 221 completed telephone interviews, Kleck decided that armed citizens were responsible for preventing upwards of 2 million crimes each year. Kleck’s fantasy has been more or less consigned to the dustbin and replaced by John Lott’s statistical mish-mash which nobody else can validate or reproduce. He says that when the number of concealed-carry licenses goes up, violent crime goes down.  Lott could teach Donald Trump a few things about how to get caught in a lie and keep insisting it’s the truth.

For GVP, the evidence pointing to increased gun violence in SYG states is not entirely conclusive but it’s strong.  On the other hand, the argument that letting people walk around ‘strapped’ generates more gun violence is less clear.  The numbers of gun deaths committed by CCW-holders averages roughly 100 per year – that’s not even 1 percent of all gun homicides and in many states the toll is less than 1 per year.

I like Caroline Light’s book – concise, readable and the analysis of court decisions is very well done.  It’s too bad it will only be taken seriously by advocates on one side.  The other side is too busy awaiting the day that every single last, bothersome gun law will finally be put to bed.  But a funny thing seems to be happening in DC because more people may show up to rally against Trump than to celebrate his great day. And most of the folks who give Trump low marks so far happen to be people who aren’t enamored of guns.  So we’ll see what we see.

 

 

Now Here’s A Sheriff Who Really Knows His Law.

December 24, 2016

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 7 Comments

There’s a little town in the middle of Indiana called Goshen which is the birthplace of the great Hollywood movie director, Howard Hawks, but will now become famous as the residence of America’s most intelligent, perceptive and downright stupid champion of the 2nd Amendment, namely, Brad Rogers, who happens to be the Sheriff in Goshen and recently opined at length in a local newspaper about the importance of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

rogers              The editorial begins with a question about whether safe storage laws should be required for everyone in Indiana who owns a gun.  And Rogers demonstrates his profound knowledge of Constitutional law by stating, “The elephant in the room is the government making those laws” because the government, according to this eminent scholar, exists only for the purpose of ‘protecting’ rights, and since we have the right to own a gun, obviously mandating safe-storage would somehow infringe on that right.

Rogers then goes on to tell his readers that safe storage doesn’t “have much of an impact on safety or crime” and he quotes John Lott “of Yale Law School” whose book, Safe Storage Gun Laws, contains the following verbiage: “15 states that passed safe storage laws saw 300 more murders, 3,860 more rapes, 24,650 more robberies, and over 25,000 more aggravated assaults in the first five years.”

I wonder if anyone in the Goshen News editorial department even bothered to check anything that Rogers wrote, because if it had been checked, they would have quickly discovered that John Lott was a Resident Scholar at Yale only from 1999 to 2001 and that he has never published any book about safe storage laws.  But that doesn’t mean that he can’t be the source for a bunch of meaningless statistics about gun violence and crime that prove nothing at all about the efficacy of safe storage laws, because the real question which needs to be asked is how many gun shootings would have occurred if those states hadn’t implemented CAP laws?

Sheriff Brad is equally opposed to mandated training before someone can buy a gun.  To support his idea, he gives the example of a woman who is the victim of domestic abuse. “She decides to purchase a firearm for her own protection. The gun dealer is not authorized to give her the gun she just purchased, because she has not yet received the required government mandated training and the certificate of proficiency. This woman is not protected from a government created to protect her rights.”  Did you follow that?  I couldn’t and I really tried. The fact that this woman might accidentally shoot herself or someone else because she didn’t know how to use the gun never popped into the sheriff’s head.

There’s an outfit out there called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that has been going around the last couple of years drumming up support among sheriffs to oppose any Obama-inspired gun laws. I can’t figure out exactly what they are going to do now that a pro-gun President’s coming to town, but for the last eight years they’ve had a good run. On the other hand, you have to remember that most sheriffs are responsible for law enforcement in rural areas that tend to vote red.  Goshen went 60-40 for Trump over Hillary, so one shouldn’t be surprised that Sheriff Rogers would be against gun control since he has to stand for re-election in 2018.

On the other hand, before everyone in the gun violence prevention community (GVP) gets completely hot and bothered about Sheriff Brad’s stance on guns, there’s also a lesson to be learned here by GVP.  Because like it or not, many of the sensible ideas for reducing gun violence bear on the ability and activity of law enforcement agencies to enforce new laws.  And enforcement costs time, and time costs money, and the last thing a local police department wants is to be given a new law to enforce without the funding necessary to carry it out.

 

 

 

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