Newest piece at Investor's Business Daily: "Michael Bloomberg, Gun Control And Fabricated Numbers"

Here is John Lott's newest piece at Investor's Business Daily:

No doubt, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg passionately believes in gun control. To his credit, he puts his own money — tens of millions of dollars, and possibly much more — into pushing the issue politically. 

But Bloomberg's push hasn't been just political advertising, lobbying and media appearances. He also funds studies that have gone overboard in backing up his anti-gun beliefs. 

To put it plainly, they have not only exaggerated their conclusions but have fabricated numbers. And these incorrect numbers have then been used to push for more regulations. 

The connections to Bloomberg are not always obvious, as he has funded several organizations, making it look like there is more widespread support. There are Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health and two organizations of which he is the primary financial supporter though they are not directly connected to his name: Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action. 

Over the last couple of years, studies from these organizations have received massive, uncritical news coverage, without even the slightest questioning of the numbers presented. 

Take the recent report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action on school shootings, which was covered in more than 2,000 news stories. . . . .

The piece is continued here. 

Newest piece in the WSJ: "The Facts About Assault Weapons and Crime"

My piece starts this way:

Warning about "weapons designed for the theater of war," President Obama on Wednesday called for immediate action on a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He said that "more of our fellow Americans might still be alive" if the original assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, had not expired in 2004. Last month, in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) promised to introduce an updated version of the ban. She too warned of the threat posed by "military weapons." 

After the nightmare of Newtown, their concern is understandable. Yet despite being at the center of the gun-control debate for decades, neither President Obama nor Ms. Feinstein (the author of the 1994 legislation) seems to understand the leading research on the effects of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In addition, they continue to mislabel the weapons they seek to ban. . . .

Copies of the studies discussed are here and here.  Feinstein's website is here.

On the most read list:

Another op-ed in Investors' Business Daily: "More Guns = More Murders? A Myth. More Guns = Fewer Murders"

My new article starts this way:

In the wake of the recent shootings, the liberal media have concluded we need more gun control. President Obama just signed 23 executive actions related to guns, and promises to do more later.To them the logic seems obvious, that more guns mean more deaths, suicides, and accidents.
And the U.S. supposedly has very high murder rates, they argue, because our nation is teeming with guns. So with stricter gun control, we would suffer fewer murders and less violence.
As Charles Blow recently claimed in the New York Times: "America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita ..."
Or as the New York Times earlier this month put forward the notion: "Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death." The claim is all over the news from CNN to various "Fact Check" articles.
It would be nice if things were that simple. . . .

 A more complete discussion is available here.

New piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The facts about gun bans"

My newest piece at the Philadelphia Inquirer starts this way:

With horrible tragedies fresh in everyone's mind, including Newtown, people are understandably wondering what can be done to prevent yet another tragedy. Alas, the mainstream media have already concluded that more gun control must be the answer. 

Passions run high on both sides. As of Thursday morning, more than 80,000 Americans had signed a White House petition asking that CNN anchor Piers Morgan, a vocal proponent of banning guns, be deported. Another petition urging the White House to "Keep Piers Morgan in the USA" had generated 4,500 signatures. Meanwhile, the Brits have launched their own petition demanding that Morgan not come back to England. The petitions are pretty silly, but they are a reflection of the divide over the gun issue. 

Unfortunately, the beliefs are just so strongly held that some prominent hosts of news programs, such as Morgan, refuse to accept facts, and go so far as to conjure up their own numbers when reality isn't to their liking. All this makes for a pretty confusing show, with viewers hearing one side say murders rose and another saying that they fell. 

Take one of my five debates on CNN after the Newtown attack. This particular discussion, involving Piers Morgan and Christiane Amanpour, was not unusual. . . .

New piece at US News: "Gun Restrictions Leave People Vulnerable and Helpless"

My piece at US News starts this way:

When bad things happen with guns, the desire to ban guns is to take away guns is understandable. But doing that can often make problems worse. 

For example, it might seem obvious to protect people by banning guns in areas. But law-abiding citizens, not those intent on committing terrorist acts, obey these bans. Instead of making places safer, disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks. With just one single exception, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the United States in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns. 

This isn't random. If it were, . . . .

Right below the phrase "The Arguments" here there is place to vote on how you liked the different pieces in the debate.

My newest Fox News piece: Bob Costas can't shoot straight when it comes to guns

My newest piece starts this way:

Bob Costas doubled down on gun control Wednesday night on "The O’Reilly Factor" and  Tuesday on MSNBC. Despite all the commotion generated by his rant on guns during halftime on NBC’s "Sunday Night Football,” he just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He called for restrictions on concealed handgun permit holders and reduced gun ownership in cities. Some Democratic lawmakers followed Costas’ lead and called for more gun control this week.  

Unfortunately, Costas’ statements were filled with errors on topics ranging from "body armor" to “automatic weapons” to the gun laws in Colorado to the views of police to the behavior of permit holders.  

During appearances on both shows Costas worried about the “Wild West, Dirty Harry mentality” of America’s 8 million concealed handgun permit holders.  

Regarding the Aurora, Colorado shooting he attacked: “people who actually believe that if a number of people were armed at the theater in Aurora, they would have been able to take down this nut job in body armor and military style artillery.” But Costas never asked why the killer picked the Cinemark’s Century 16 Theater in Aurora, Colorado on July 20th to commit mass murder. . . .

There are lots of other mistakes that Costas made in his presentation, but I only had about 800 words.  I would have also gone through the claimed benefits from background checks, let alone Costas' claim that even more stringent rules are needed.  The literature on the lack of benefits from mandatory training would have been useful also. His belief that he had never known of a professional athlete who had been helped by the presence of a gun misses the case of T.J. Slaughter who claims that he was being threatened by other motorists.

Newest piece at Fox News: The truth about Costas, Belcher and guns

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Did Jovan Belcher, the 6’2” 228 pound linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, need a gun to kill his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins? How about to commit suicide? Apparently some think that Saturday's murder-suicide tragedy in Kansas City wouldn't have happened if he hadn't had a firearm. Amazingly, during halftime on NBC’s "Sunday Night Football," Bob Costas told viewers he believed: “If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.” 

Belcher apparently killed Perkins, the 22-year-old mother of his 3-month-old daughter, at home. The horrible tragedy occurred in front of Perkins’ mom. He then drove to the Chiefs' practice facility where he committed suicide. 

Guns can make it easier to kill people, but that isn’t relevant here. Even if no weapon existed, the strength differential is so large that Belcher could have easily killed Perkins in any number of ways. The same is true, sadly, about suicide. There are so many ways that Belcher could have killed himself, including crashing his car at a high rate of speed into a wall or even another car as he drove to Arrowhead Stadium.  

Unfortunately, pointing to two deaths here does nothing to advance the case for gun control. Costas’ rant falls under the category of if gun control could save just one life it would be worth it. The argument makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t have gun control if guns can save one life.  

The question is the net effect of guns, and what Costas ignores is that guns save a lot more lives than they cost each year. And that's not even mentioning the roughly 2 million times a year that people use guns defensively. 

Whether people like Costas like it or not the facts speak for themselves . . .

New op-ed at National Review Online: ‘Military-Style Weapons’: Function, not cosmetics, should govern gun policy

My newest piece starts this way:

‘AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities,” President Obama told the National Urban League on Wednesday. After the deadly attack in Colorado last Friday, the president’s concern is understandable. However, even — or perhaps especially — at such a time, distinctions need to be made.

The police in Aurora, Colo., reported that the killer used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15. This weapon bears a cosmetic resemblance to the M-16, which has been used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War. The call has frequently been made that there is “no reason” for such “military-style weapons” to be available to civilians.

Yes, the M&P 15 and the AK-47 are “military-style weapons.” But the key word is “style” — they are similar to military guns in their aesthetics, not in the way they actually operate. The guns covered by the federal assault-weapons ban (which was enacted in 1994 and expired ten year later) were not the fully automatic machine guns used by the military but semi-automatic versions of those guns. . . .

New op-ed at National Review Online: ‘Military-Style Weapons’: Function, not cosmetics, should govern gun policy

My newest piece starts this way:

‘AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities,” President Obama told the National Urban League on Wednesday. After the deadly attack in Colorado last Friday, the president’s concern is understandable. However, even — or perhaps especially — at such a time, distinctions need to be made.

The police in Aurora, Colo., reported that the killer used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15. This weapon bears a cosmetic resemblance to the M-16, which has been used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War. The call has frequently been made that there is “no reason” for such “military-style weapons” to be available to civilians.

Yes, the M&P 15 and the AK-47 are “military-style weapons.” But the key word is “style” — they are similar to military guns in their aesthetics, not in the way they actually operate. The guns covered by the federal assault-weapons ban (which was enacted in 1994 and expired ten year later) were not the fully automatic machine guns used by the military but semi-automatic versions of those guns. . . .

New op-ed in the New York Daily News: Concealed weapons save lives, The evidence is clear: Massacres are stopped by legally armed citizens

My newest piece there starts this way:

Friday’s horrible shooting in Colorado occurred in yet another place where guns are banned. And that’s consistent with a trend: With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms.

The Cinemark movie theater in Aurora, like others run by the chain around the country, displayed warning signs that it was illegal to carry guns into the theater.

This applied to all nonlaw enforcement personnel, including individuals with concealed handgun permits. In other words, despite more than 4% of the adult population of Colorado having concealed handgun permits, a gunman intent on killing a lot of people could be confident that law-abiding citizens there would be sitting ducks.

If one of the hundreds of people at the theater had a concealed handgun, . . .

Mayor Bloomberg has a competing piece also on guns in the same newspaper and his is "Gun Control Cannot Wait."

Newest Fox News piece: UN gun control treaty will reveal gun laws Obama really supports

Since I wrote this piece, I am hearing that the UN is unlikely put out the Arms Trade Treaty either tomorrow or next week. I have also heard the problem is with China and Russia who don't want any restrictions on government selling guns. My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Sometime later this week, the UN will finally unveil its Arms Trade Treaty. The exact date the treaty will be released is a secret.

Russia, China, France -- with its new Socialist government -- Britain and the Obama administration are writing the treaty behind closed doors. Yet even if the final treaty is being kept under wraps, we still have a pretty good idea of some of the requirements that will be in it.

The group writing the treaty is not promising. Russia and Britain ban handguns and many other types of weapons. The possession of guns for self-defense is completely prohibited in China. The Obama administration is undoubtedly the most hostile administration to gun ownership in US history, with Obama having personally supported bans of handguns and semi-automatic weapons before becoming president. And remember the recent scandal where the Obama administration was caught allowing guns go to Mexican drug gangs, hoping it would help push for gun control laws.

The treaty seems unlikely to ever receive the two-thirds majority necessary to be ratified by the US Senate, but that doesn't mean it still won't have consequences for Americans. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the media's misleading rhetoric on guns

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Democrats want to make gun control an issue in the upcoming November elections. With Obama telling gun control proponents last year to be patient, that he was pushing gun control “under the radar,” it was probably always destined to be an issue. But the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida has opened up an opportunity for Democrats to more openly embrace it. When asked about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law on Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden warned: “as a consequence of the [gun control] laws, [people] unintendedly put themselves in harm's way.” Biden praised Florida's governor for setting up a commission to review the state's "Stand your ground" law and reminded everyone that Obama had already called for everything, including gun laws, to be re-examined. There's no question that the media has pushed the Martin story. . . .

Washington Examiner piece: "Ask Canada -- gun registration won't make D.C. safer"

My piece with Gary Mauser in the Washington Examiner starts this way:

The D.C. Council will soon vote on a new law that would eliminate several obstacles for gun buyers -- a five-hour training course, ballistics testing, a vision test, and a ban on certain types of ammunition. But they will leave unchanged the registration requirement for gun owners. D.C. could learn a lot from Canada's decision to finally rescind its gun registry in February.Beginning in 1998, Canadians spent a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a registry for long guns -- in the U.S., the same amount per gun owner would come to $67 billion. For all that money, the registry was never credited with solving a single murder. Instead, it became an enormous waste of police officers' time, diverting their efforts from traditional policing activities. . . .

Newest Op-ed piece: Death of a Long-Gun Registry

My piece with Gary Mauser at National Review Online starts this way:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.
Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.
Nice logic, but reality never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.
The statistics speak for themselves. . . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Blame Bush -- Is That Holder's Strategy to Get Out of the 'Fast and Furious' Mess?

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Blame Bush. It has been almost three years since President Obama took office, yet he still blames Bush for the bad economy. Now the Obama administration is following the same strategy to get out of the "Fast and Furious" mess.
"Fast and Furious," also called the "Gunwalker" case, involves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) agents ordering American gun dealers to sell guns to obvious Mexican drug gang members during 2009 and 2010. This was done over the objections of the gun dealers.
Both Fox News and the Washington Post started covering this scandal in early February this year. It may be excusable that Attorney General Eric Holder did not read the press reports, but, if we are to believe his congressional testimony Tuesay, he and his staff also neglected to pay attention to the 100 or so page "weekly reports" summarizing activity in the Justice Department. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Media Silence Is Deafening About Important Gun News

My newest piece starts this way:

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C. 
Politicians predicted disaster. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision. 

Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would "go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we'll settle it in the streets . . . ." 
The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court's "unwise" decision that there is a right for people "to keep guns in the home." 

But Armageddon never happened. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Illinois Gun Info Plan Is Misguided and Dangerous

My newest Fox News piece starts off this way:

Suppose you or your family are being stalked by a criminal who intends to harm you. Would you feel safer putting a sign in front of your home saying "This home is a gun-free zone"? Would it frighten criminals away?

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. But, despite strong opposition from the Illinois State Police, Democrat Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seems determined to publicly identify gun and non-gun owners across the state. For some unknown reason, The Associated Press made a Freedom of Information Act request to the police.

One would think that people in Illinois of all places would understand this problem. . . .

Recent debate on CSPAN's Washington Journal

Video of my discussion with Paul Helmke today on CSPAN's Washington Journal.

Letter published in today's New York Times

With all the recent articles and editorials calling for gun control, the New York Times ran letters responding to their pieces today. Of the five letters, four supported more gun control and mine took the other side (that is 503 words versus 162). Mine was the fourth in the list.

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof attacked my research in his Jan. 13 column. While conceding that “concealed weapons didn’t lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast,” Mr. Kristof asserted that “many studies have now debunked” my finding that more guns lead to less crime.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of studies support my results. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data find that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none find a bad effect from the law. Among non-refereed studies, three find drops in crime and two say either no effect or possibly small increases in crime.

Mr. Kristof cites a public health professor’s suggestions for one-gun-a-month sales limits, gun safes and further background checks, but I know of no academic criminologists or economists who have found that these laws reduce any type of violent crime. No gun ban has reduced murder rates.

John R. Lott Jr.
Alexandria, Va., Jan. 17, 2011

The writer is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

Newest Fox News piece: The Arizona Shootings, Gun Violence Research and the Facts vs. The New York Times

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

You know you’re doing something right when two New York Times columnists, Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristof, attack your research on the same day. Kristof followed up on criticism leveled earlier in the week by others writing for The Times. I must have said something substantial enough to warrant this attention. Let us check the facts.

Gail Collins worries that law-abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns can't be trusted:

"One can only hope that Saturday's horrible attack in Tucson encourages more citizens to carry concealed handguns," wrote John Lott, Jr. . . . on Wednesday. As a model, he pointed to Joseph Zamudio, . . . Lott's theory was that Zamudio was able to lend a hand "because his legally carried 9 mm semiautomatice offered him protection." He neglected to mention that while Zamudio never fired at the gunman, he almost drew on an innocent man by mistake.

No, it was not my mere speculation. Zamudio himself told Fox News' “Fox & Friends” that he though that carrying a gun made him willing to run towards the shots while almost everyone else was running for cover. . . .