John Donohue responded to our comments on our website and in an op-ed at Fox News. Below we go through and respond to the points that he raised. Amusingly, the author of the original piece in Michael Bloomberg’s “The Trace” emailed Donohue as soon as my comments came out. While The Trace pretends to be a regular news outlet, Mr.…
A new, unpublished study by John Donohue, Abhay Aneja, and Kyle Weber has received a lot of attention for supposedly finding some evidence that right-to-carry laws increase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
On March 10th, Rachael Joseph, the Director of Outreach for Protect Minnesota and who works with Bloomberg’s Everytown, had a piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune attacking Dr. John Lott. The piece was supposedly about Lott’s op-ed on Stand Your Ground laws, the Bloomberg group’s letter never actually takes issue with any of the points raised in Lott’s piece. …
attacks by gun control advocates, Letters that we submitted, op-ed, Response to critics
I have responded previously to some of these claims by Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes. Their latest attack is over at ThinkProgress, which bills itself as providing a progressive perspective. No doubt, the attack was prompted by the media coverage that I have been getting for my new book, The War on Guns. …
DeFilippis and Hughes have another piece attacking Dr. Lott’s new book The War on Guns (UPDATE: DeFilippis and Hughes discretely note by their byline that they have updated this piece, but we haven’t taken the time to go through it again to see what they have changed.). Past responses to Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes claims are available here and here. …
Dr. John Lott had a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times responding to an error filled op-ed by gun control advocates Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes, who appear to be part of the Bloomberg funded gun control network.
…To the editor: Evan DeFilippis’ and Devin Hughes’ op-ed article defending gun control and criticizing my research is filled with flaws.
In mid-November John Lott got into an exchange with Gary Kleck about “More Guns, Less Crime.” This took place after other Kleck statements to the media about me.
In the new discussion, Gary continues to go out of his way to engage in personal attacks on Lott: “he instead invents a distorted straw man,” “presents a fantasy version,” “Lott’s version of economic theory is one that has been dead for decades,” “One of Lott’s many errors is to blindly assume,” “In his efforts to distort my positions .…
In August, Kleck told Mother Jones that he doesn’t know of any “credible criminologist” who believes that “with more guns there are less crimes.” More recently Kleck was interviewed by Ari Armstrong about these points and Kleck’s claims that there hasn’t been any increase in the rate that people are carrying permitted concealed handguns and that neither more guns nor more concealed handguns reduce homicides or any other type of violent crime. …
Gun control advocates want to argue that the only reason that people would support gun ownership is because they are getting paid off by gun makers. Shira Goodman, the Executive Director of CeaseFirePA, made this argument in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (on November 1, 2015). Bizarrely, she had also just recently made the same claim during an October debate that I had with her at Duquesne Law School. …
attacks by gun control advocates, op-ed, Response to critics
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) has spent some time putting together contact information for the CPRC’s academic board of advisors and the deans of their schools (see here and here). The notion is that they think that they can intimidate all these prestigious academics into hiding. Media Matters and other gun control media have tried getting others to join in getting people to contact the deans of our academic advisors. …
