Before Thanksgiving, Politico ran a piece about the “Controversial gun advocate hired by Justice Department last month.” Media outlets from the Daily Caller to the left-wing Talking Points Memos, Michael Bloomberg’s The Trace have had several articles on Media Matters and Crime Reports.
Gun controllers were very upset: David Hogg, Everytown, Moms Demand, Shannon Watts, The Giffords Law Center, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an op-ed writer for the Washington Post, etc have called for him to be fired. Now nine Democrat US Senators have gone after Attorney General Barr and the Trump Administration (see the letter shown below). Virtually all the Democrat Senators who are on the Senate Judiciary Committee joined in signing the letter: Senator Dianne Feinstein, Richard Durbin, Amy Klobuchar, Patrick Leahy, Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Coons, Richard Blumenthal, and Cory Booker. Kamala Harris is the sole current member who didn’t sign the letter.
To remind people, Dr. Lott has an impressive academic record that makes him a perfect choice to be in the US Department of Justice. In addition to being a Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the Office of Justice Programs in the Department of Justice, our About CPRC page on our founder and first president has this:
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr. is an economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime. Lott has held research or teaching positions at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988-1989. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted: “John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues.”
Lott is a prolific author for both academic and popular publications. He has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and written ninebooks, including “More Guns, Less Crime,” “The Bias Against Guns,” and “Freedomnomics.” His most recent books are “Dumbing Down the Courts: How politics keeps the smartest judges off the bench” and “The War on Guns.”
He has been one of the most productive and cited economists in the world (during 1969 to 2000 he ranked 26th worldwide in terms of quality adjusted total academic journal output, 4th in terms of total research output, and 86th in terms of citations). Among economics, business and law professors his research is currently the 28th most downloaded in the world. He is also a frequent writer of op-eds.
If you want to see some of the academic research that has confirmed Lott’s work in More Guns, Less Crime see the research papers available here.
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