Dr. John Lott was interviewed about recent claims about how frequent schools shootings are in the US. From the Fox News article:
John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center and contributor to FoxNews.com, who has published “More Guns, Less Crime,” has long been in the thick of the gun debate. He goes into particulars on school shootings statistics, stating that the incidents under discussion include “a school-bus window broken by a pellet gun, a gun accidentally discharged in a weapons class at a . . . community college, a gun accidentally discharged by a police officer with no one harmed, a college student using a gun [to] stop himself from being beaten.”
Lott thinks the reporting on school shootings isn’t just misleading, but harmful. As he explains, “any death is a tragedy . . . but despite the recent uptick, the number of murders from school shootings has clearly been falling over time since the beginning of the 1990s. It is hard to think of any benefit from exaggerating the risks and making people think that this is a growing problem. It terrorizes kids.” . . .
Lott thinks the press “too readily gives mass news attention to reports from . . . gun control organizations and only fact-checks them weeks after the initial news stories . . . My suggestion is that reporters contact others in the field to get critical comments before they publish news stories, and in this case actually take the time to do independent news searches on these cases themselves.” . . .
This story also appeared at local Fox affiliates around the country, such as Fox 26 in Medford, Oregon.
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