Dr. John Lott's Newletter

[hso]

Dr. Lotts site is a valuable source of information for 2A advocates and his newsletter is a good source as well.

The debate in Washington and across the country continues to heat up. I will be testifying in Washington before the Senate and House Joint Economic Committee on September 18th and Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee on September 24th. But that is just a small fraction of what is happening.

Unfortunately, the NRA is not participating in the current public debate — they are not appearing on television or radio — because they know that their representatives asked questions about the NRA’s claimed financial improprieties before they have to deal with the current gun control debate. The NRA isn’t even putting out op-eds. I take no stand on what is happening with the organization, but I only mean to comment on the gap that has created in the overall gun control debate. The vast majority of Republican politicians are hiding from the discussion because they don’t know what arguments to make. Worse, outlets such as National Review, Fox News and to some extent the Washington Times, that would typically be providing our side of the debate have been pushing lots of gun control falsehoods. That makes our role of providing objective, high-quality research all the more important.

This is causing us to work even harder than usual.

The last couple of weeks have incredibly busy. I had a debate at FreedomFest in Las Vegas against Michael Shermer. While much of the audience was presumably sympathetic to my side to begin with, I won a supposedly objective set of jurors by a 10 to 2 vote and the audience by 83% to 17%. Unfortunately, because of copyrights, I can only publicly share my portion of the debate, but it is available here.

Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld has a podcast that I did a couple of days ago that I highly recommend. Greg and I talked for a half-hour, but we had a chance to cover in some detail a significant part of the current gun control debate. If you have time, this is the one interview that I would listen to.

I have also had recent television appearances on One America News, NewsMax, Sinclair Broadcast's 191 local TV stations, and Canada’s CTV. Radio interviews on national shows included Sebastian Gorka, Lars Larson, Buck Sexton, Jim Bohannon, and Joe Pags. The one with Seb Gorka was particularly lively. If you like contentious radio interviews, I did another one in the UK. Another podcast with Chuck Woolery and Mark Young allowed an hour-long in-depth discussion about a range of gun control issues.

We have also put up evaluations of the gun control proposals offered by Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Our op-eds have covered everything from a piece with Thomas Massie on Red Flag laws to problems with Universal Background checks to Twitter's continued efforts to silence our side of the debate.

Over the last couple of weeks our research has gotten discussed in every place from Newsweek to the PBS News Hour.

If you missed seeing a recent talk of mine that was carried by C-SPAN a few weeks ago, it is worth a watch as it covers a lot of the issues in the current debate.

For information on activities at the Crime Prevention Research Center, here is a link to our “info deck.” (Sorry, the link didn't work last time we sent it out, but it should now.) Please view in full-screen mode and scroll using the arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen.

But we need help getting this message out. We need to do it now while we can influence the debate. The media is very resistant to letting people know these facts. I don't normally ask you for this help. I can put in the hours, but we need your support to get people to learn about what we do.

If you have any friends who you think might find our emails of interest, please encourage them to sign up by sending them the link here.

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Debate
Gun Ownership on Trial: John Lott’s Presentation at FreedomFest’s Mock Trial
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Op-eds
At Townhall: Kamala Harris’s Poorly Thought Out Gun Control Proposals
At the New York Daily News: Twitter’s debate-chilling problem: The social media site’s arbitrary policies allow foreign nations to censor American — often without explanation
At the Daily Caller: Here’s Why A Universal Background Check Law Would Be Bad
At National Review: ‘Red Flag’ Laws Are the Wrong Solution to Mass Shootings
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Television/Video interviews
On One America News’ The Daily Ledger: About Background Checks on the Private Transfers of guns
On NewsMax’s America Talks Live: What gun control laws will get passed in Washington? Are Background Checks really costless?
On Sinclair Broadcasting’s America This Week: Panel on Guns in America
On Canadian CTV: The very initial news coverage of the El Paso Mass Public Shooting

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Given that the gun control advocates are perfectly willing to pretend that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is supposed to be read as "the power of the state militia" because they believe in the utility of gun control as crime control, the NRA's messaging to the voting public on the RKBA solely as a 2A thing is going to fall on a lot of deaf ears.

James D. Wright and Peter Rossi were two liberal sociologists hired by the Carter Administration in 1977 to research guns, crime and violence in America. They went in accepting the liberal/Democrat party "common wisdom" on gun control (the stuff being pushed today -- gun control as immunization - guns are the germ of gun violence; eradicate the germ, eradicate the problem); their report to the government 1981 reflected the fact that empirical research and analysis convinced them the common wisdom was oversimplified or flat-out wrong. It was expanded into a book, <i>Under the Gun</i> (Aldine, 1983) and later they analysed the first DoJ prison inmate survey on firearms use by offenders and published their results as <i>Armed and Considered Dangerous</i> (Aldine, 1986). Both books have been issued in updated and revised editions over the years. I have found the firearms use by offenders surveys repeated by National Institute of Justice 1991, 1999, 2004.

Serious peer-reviewed empirical research indicates that gun control is not only un-constitutional but in-effective. The news media and politicians and social refomists treat "gun control" as an unquestionable good and offer no analysis on how it's supposed to work. The message NRA should have stayed on was (a) gun control is a violation of 2A, 4A and 5A and (b) it does little or no good at a great cost in taxpayer dollars and constitutional rights.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

The current NRA leadership did not stop me from sending $28 to NRA-ILA for a commemorative knife and a chance to indirectly give a pointer finger to Andy Cuomo and his AG.

If ACLU keeps standing against 1A, 4A, 5A violations done in the name of gun control, I might be tempted to re-up there.

John Lott, like James Wright, Peter Rossi, Gary Kleck, accepted the conventional wisdom on gun control, until he asked his class at Wharton's what subject would they thought should be subjected to economic analysis. A student suggested gun control. Lott started reading what passed as research on gun control and found it was mostly true believer op-ed level advocacy pieces. That got him started on the road to his first book, More Guns, Less Crime (U Chicago Press, 1998). Of course he did not gore the sacred ox gun control without a lot of backlash.

 

[old lady new shooter]

Just want to thank hso for posting the link. I'm now getting the newsletter and it is excellent.