CPRC on Fox News: LIES AND LAWLESSNESS

Aug 2, 2015 | Featured

Lott of Stossel about false claims about guns and crime

LIES AND LAWLESSNESS: Does gun ownership lead to more homicides, suicides and accidental deaths? Is rape rampant on campus? The media certainly says so. John Lott weighs in.

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3 Comments

  1. Michael green

    Armed Citizens Make Fewer Mistakes Than Police
    Don’t think that just because the police are trained in the use of firearms that they are less likely to kill an innocent person. A University of Chicago Study revealed that in 1993 approximately 700,000 police killed 330 innocent individuals, while approximately 250,000,000 private citizens only killed 30 innocent people. Do the math. That’s a per capita rate for the police, of almost 4000 times higher than the population in general. OK, that is a little misleading. Let’s just include the 80,000,000 gun owning citizens. Now the police are down to only a 1200 times higher accidental shooting rate than the gun-owning population in general.
    That still sounds high. So let’s look at it in a different light. According to a study byNewsweek magazine, only 2% of civilian shootings involve an innocent person being shot (not killed). The error rate for police is 11%. What this means is that you are more than 5 times more likely to be accidentally shot by a policeman than by an armed citizen. But, when you consider that citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as do police every year, it means that, per capita, you are more than 11 times more likely to be accidentally shot by a policeman than by an armed citizen. That is as low as I can get that number.

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