A new, unpublished study by John Donohue, Abhay Aneja, and Kyle Weber has received a lot of attention for supposedly finding some evidence that right-to-carry laws increase overall violent crime rates. It has been covered in Newsweek, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Vice, Snopes, and many newspapers such as Newsday and the Salt Lake City Tribune. …
concealed carry, How law-abiding are concealed handgun permit holders, John Donohue, media bias on guns, Response to critics
Dr. John Lott has a new piece at the New York Daily News on why NPR and PBS should not get public subsidies. It talks a little about NPR’s biases in covering the gun issue. The piece starts this way:
…Whatever original purpose public broadcasting had back in 1969, President Trump is right: The reason for its existence is long gone.
Dr. John Lott talked about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back an Obama administration rule on background checks for gun purchases. The conversation explains how Obama’s rule banned gun ownership by Social Security recipients who received help on their finances and how the media and various politicians have inaccurately described those rules.…
With the debate over gun-free zones heating up in the Wyoming legislature, Dr. John Lott has a piece in the Capitol city’s newspaper, the Tribune Eagle. Lott was responding to a piece in the paper by Kerry Drake that had attacked Lott and the research from the CPRC.
Strangely, after the piece went up, Dr.…
Despite us emphasizing the Associated Press reporter with how incredibly rare any problems were with carrying guns at legislatures and noting that not one had been harmed in those cases, the reporter focused the very rare, minor problems that have occurred. The AP headline for the piece is “Gun-friendly statehouses see occasional reckless conduct.” Relying largely on our data on where guns are permitted on statehouse grounds, the reporter lists one accidental discharge and two cases where people have temporarily misplaced their guns. …
Carrying on Statehouse grounds, media bias on guns, Media Discussion on CPRC
Dr. John Lott had an op-ed in the Orange County Register on California Politifact’s biases on the gun control issue. The piece started this way:
…. . . Take a couple of PolitiFact California’s two most recent evaluations concerning gun violence.
• “Since the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than seven children per day have died from gun violence” (California Congresswoman Jackie Speier, December 14th, 2016).
While the CDC has made some big mistakes exaggerating the number of accidental gun deaths, it is a common refrain that the CDC is missing out on accidental gun deaths for those under age 18. A new Associated Press report claims that the true number of accidental gun deaths for those under age 18 is 141, not 77.…
accidental gun deaths, Correcting government errors, media bias on guns
Dr. John Lott talked to Dana Loesch about claims made in the Katie Couric movie on background checks and the EPIX channel’s announcement on Tuesday that they are no longer going to be showing her movie.
Katie Couric’s gun control movie has gotten a lot of criticism for fraudulently editing a discussion with the Virginia Citizens Defense League. Just earlier today apologized today for the misleading edits. The link to EPIX is available here. The two might not be unrelated. Will Apple now pull the movie from iTunes?…
On May 22nd, the New York Times published an investigative report on mass shootings. It claimed that about three-quarters of mass shootings involved blacks. 86 percent occurred in zip codes “poorer than the nation as a whole.” But their data came from less than reliable sources.
“The Times compiled its list of 358 shootings with four or more casualties from largely crowd-sourced lists managed by the social media network Reddit and Gun Violence Archive”
There is a reason that researchers generally rely on FBI and CDC data rather than media reports.…
