CPRC in the News: NBC News, Connecticut Post, WRCB TV, Guns.com, and others

Oct 26, 2016 | Featured

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NBC News, October , 2016; WRCB TV (Chattanooga, TN), October 26, 2016; Inland News Today (Riverside, CA), October 26, 2016

If anyone has a bone to pick with the Johns Hopkins report, it is John Lott. He is an economist and author of “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies” whose work is often cited by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups. He argues that concealed-carry laws make the public safer because they put guns in the hands of people who are more law abiding than the general public.

Lott said he couldn’t take seriously a report that singled him out so frequently and was based on the assumption that college-aged permit holders were as reckless as those who didn’t have permits.

He claimed many other researches have come to similar conclusions as his — although it’s worth noting that the gun-rights advocates have helped block federal research into gun violence for years.

And he argued that the reason it was hard to corroborate prevented attacks because such incidents often do not attract public attention.

“It’s hard to find any group in the population that’s as law abiding as the people who are willing to go through the process of getting a permit,” Lott said. . . .

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Wausau Daily Herald, October 17, 2016

This anti-firearm piece uses records compiled by USA TODAY NETWORK, hardly a scientific operation. The author John Lott Jr. set out dozens of statistical studies in two books that more than adequately refute the scare and doom numbers in this purported analysis. . . .

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Guns.com, October 26, 2016

Dr. John Lott, economist and author of “The War on Guns,” said Monday the report is political and not “a serious attempt to deal with existing arguments.”

“I can’t find one single case where a concealed carry permit holder on college property has committed a crime. It just doesn’t happen,” he said. “I can find five cases of accidental discharge, but nobody was killed in those and they were pretty trivial. You could argue they are overly cautious. They are extremely cautious in how they use their weapon.”

Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center and is a favorite among gun rights groups for his research linking lower crime rates to concealed carry laws. Gun control advocates pan his expertise and remain critical of his research methodology.

Webster, too, attacks Lott’s research in his report and writes that, in fact, access to weapons during the turbulent adolescent and early adulthood years increases the risk of violence.

“Risky decision-making in adolescence and early adulthood is due, in part, to on-going brain development during that stage of life that can compromise emotional and behavioral regulation, impulse control, and judgment — all of which are essential for avoiding the circumstances in which firearm access leads to tragedy,” Webster said. “Age-specific homicide offending peaks around the age when youth reach the minimum legal age for purchasing, possessing, and carrying handguns (19-21 years).”

Lott argues research regarding “whether these people actually get into trouble” doesn’t support Webster’s claims.

“The CPRC has actually done such a study on just that subject, and found that college-age permit holders are at least as law-abiding as all other permit holders,” Lott said. “For three states, we have data on revocations by age of the permit holder. Generally, those under age 23 are at least as law-abiding as those who are 23 and older.”

Lott’s research shows of the 14.5 million concealed carry permit holders across the United States, revocation rates for those permits are rare — occurring at “rates of tenths or hundredths of one percent.”

Losing a permit over a firearm-related incident is rarer still, Lott said, occurring at “rates of thousandths or tens of thousandths of one percent.” . . .

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Bearing Arms, October 26, 2016

“That’s like finding out a lot of cars in New York come from another state,” said John R. Lott Jr., President of the Crime Prevention Research Center. “Pick a state in the South — you’ll find a lot of guns from those states come from out of state originally. Products move around.” . . .

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Connecticut Post (Bridgeport, CT), October 24, 2016; NewsTimes (Danbury, CT), October 25, 2016

The facts don’t support that conclusion. In a recent column in the Las Vegas Review Journal, economist John Lott Jr. notes that states with these so-called universal background checks experienced “a post-2000 increase of 15 percent in per capita rates of mass public shooting fatalities. They also saw a 38 percent increase in the rate of injury.” He goes on to note that “there is no evidence that expanded background checks reduce rates of any type of violent crime.”

Put simply, Lott’s conclusions are based on conducting research the right way — considering all the variables which contribute to violent crime and looking over an extended time frame to find answers. His findings, not CAP’s, are consistent with extensive studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by the National Academy of Sciences that found no evidence that gun control actually reduces crime, despite what gun control proponents have to say. . . .

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Guns.com, October 21, 2016

Dr. John Lott, economist and author of “The War on Guns,” criticized the study’s methodology more directly, saying it didn’t account for outside influences and cherry-picked years to analyze data.

“The problem is none of the evidence they have actually looks at evidence as to whether the laws really reduced the level of violence,” he said. “It’s a weird dataset and very cross-sectional. Virtually no academics would do that.”

Lott founded the Crime Prevention Research Center and is a favorite among gun rights groups for his research linking lower crime rates to concealed carry laws. Gun control advocates pan his expertise and remain critical of his research methodology, featured in other best-selling books “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias Against Guns,” among others.

Lott, in particular, took issue with the way the study measured lethal use of force by police officers: it compiled data from The Guardian and The Washington Post reported over the last year, citing a lack of federal records available.

“I mean are they seriously going to argue that data is only available for one year? It’s just not serious discussion,” he said.

The CAP report referenced two studies conducted by Daniel Webster, professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he serves as the Director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research, which purportedly illustrate the impact of requiring universal background checks for handgun purchases in two states, Connecticut and Missouri. Specifically, Webster found a 40 percent drop in Connecticut’s gun-related homicides after implementing the law, while Missouri’s rate skyrocketed 26 percent after repealing the requirement.

Lott says this study’s “sloppy” methodology doesn’t prove anything.

“If you have 19 states that have had these laws at one time or another, you don’t just pick Missouri and Connecticut,” he said. “You look at all the states.” . . .

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The Truth about Guns, October 26, 2016

In January of this year, More Guns, Less Crime author John Lott [not shown] notified the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that they’d made a mistake. The CDC had reported that there’d been 105 accidental firearms-related deaths in Tennessee during the year 2014. The actual number? Five. That was down from 2013’s total of 19 accidental firearms-related deaths.

In September, safetennesseeproject.org put out a news release based the erroneous CDC numbers, calling for harsh new infringments on residents’ Second Amendment rights. Members of the mainstream media took the artificially inflated ball and ran with it.

From memphisdailynews.com:

In a news release, The Safe Tennessee Project, a grassroots gun-violence prevention organization, said that 105 people died in the state from accidental gunshots in 2014, media outlet reported.

The year before that, there were 19 such deaths in Tennessee, and the state had ranked ninth in accidental shootings.

“We’ve actually been aware of the new numbers for several months, but the increase was so dramatic that we wanted to confirm the numbers before reporting them,” said Beth Joslin Roth, Policy Director for The Safe Tennessee Project.

According to Roth, the group first asked the CDC and state health officials to check the numbers for accuracy. Those figures were then verified.

Wrong. While the CDC has not yet corrected the incorrect data, they fully and publicly admit the error. . . .

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The New American, October 24, 2016

. . . Apparently, neither position needs to be backed up with facts, and if the facts are not available to support it, they can be manufactured to fit the occasion. That was evident during the third and final presidential debate last Wednesday night when Clinton said, “I support the Second Amendment…. I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case because what the District of Columbia [v. Heller ruling] was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns. And so they wanted people with guns to safely store them.”

But that was a far cry from what the court actually ruled in the case. Responded John Lott, the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center: If the ruling contributed to the problem that Clinton describes, one would think that there would have been a lot of accidental gun deaths involving toddlers. But there doesn’t appear to have been a single accidental gun death of any kind in the District, let alone for toddlers, during the eight years since the Heller decision was announced. . . .

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