Mlive.com reports on an 11-year-old in Lapeer County, Michigan who was able to protect herself against two home invaders. An 11-year-old girl used the shotgun she normally keeps to go hunting with her father to scare off a robber in her home, police said. The girl was...
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Afghan police arming schoolteachers and university lecturers to protect against terrorist attacks
Since the Taliban massacred 150 people at a Peshawar school in December, the Afghan police are teaching teachers how to use guns to protect their students and themselves. The CPRC has recently discussed the benefits of letting civilians rather than uniformed police...
New survey on the views of academic economists who research guns
The CPRC is releasing a new survey entitled: "Economists’ views on guns: Crime, suicides, and right-to-carry concealed handgun laws" (shorter published version is available here). The survey of economists conducted from August 25th to September 12th 2014 found...
Paper on the politicization of the FBI forthcoming in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today, March 2015
The paper can be downloaded here or here. The introduction: In a report released last week, the FBI claimed that between 2000 and 2013 there were 160 "active shooting incidents" in public places. Even more worrisome, these attacks increased dramatically from...
Two burglars were thwarted by a University of Central Florida student with a gun
Students also benefit from the option to protect themselves. In the video available here, the male student describes how one of the burglars pointed a gun (what turned out to be a pellet gun) at point blank range right at the student's head. From WESH.com in...
Are guns “more likely to kill you than a car is”? No
The Economist magazine had the headline in mid January: "A gun is now more likely to kill you than a car is." It is a claim that has been repeated over and over again (see Forbes, The Atlantic, Slate (question 9), Vox (also at MSN News), RT, college newspapers across...
CPRC on Frank Beckmann’s Show on WJR, the coming anti-gun push from Bloomberg
CPRC's John Lott was on the 50,000 Watt WJR from 10:50 to 11:00 AM on Friday, January 30th. Steve Gruber was substituting for Frank. Lott and Steve discussed the huge amounts of money that Bloomberg, various foundations, and President Obama are putting into trying to...
One reason that the surveys on gun ownership may underestimate the number of gun owners
We have pointed out the conflicting polls on the percent of population owning guns, but there is a good reason to believe that these surveys have missed any increase in gun ownership because of an increasing distrust that Americans have in telling pollsters whether...
Iowa’s concealed handgun permits soar 450 percent since 2010, CPRC in the news at Fox News
From an article at Fox News: In 2010, Iowa's numbers were just shy of 40,000, but according to data from the Iowa Department of Public Safety, last year the number crested 220,000. In 2011 alone, the number of permits issued in the state more than doubled. Nationally,...
CPRC in the New York Daily News: Rates that police kill black and white teenagers
From the New York Daily News: Black male teenagers are killed by police 2.3 times as often as whites, John Lott, the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, found. . . . While the 2.3 times number is much more accurate than the claims put forward by Slate...
CPRC at Fox News: “Terrorists can strike any time, anywhere: Self defense saves lives”
John Lott's newest piece at Fox News starts this way: Terrorists can strike anywhere and at any time, giving them a huge strategic advantage.Unfortunately, too many politicians around the world are refusing to admit this. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris...
Do “more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings”? Yes.
Leonard Pitts, Jr. starts off his national newspaper column this way: Tucker Carlson said on Fox that more children die of bathtub drownings than of accidental shootings. They don't. Yet, Mr. Pitts is the one who is wrong. According to the U.S. Consumer Product...