John R. Lott on Gun Control Myths
2022-06-03 · Guest: John Lott (Economist and Author) · 52:13
Data and myths surrounding gun control
Bob Zadek interviews economist Dr. John Lott about the data and myths surrounding gun control. They discuss the high error rates in background checks, the racial disparities in gun permit issuance, the failure of gun bans to reduce murder rates, and the reality of mass shootings in “gun-free zones.”
Topics: Gun Control, Second Amendment, Background Checks, Concealed Carry, Mass Shootings, Crime Data, Racial Disparity, Public Policy
Speakers: Bob Zadek, John Lott
Introduction: Following the Science [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are about at the 15-year mark and proudly counting. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
During the COVID period last year, we have heard over and over and over again politicians defending their edicts, their mandates, their guidances—defending all of that with the phrase, “We’re just following the science wherever it goes.” Would that that were true, but it was not, as history already has been showing us. Politicians have often hid behind the science, but never followed it.
I have often observed with my guests on my show and in social conversation, and I have found and mentioned that very often in having a conversation on any subject—but let’s say policy, public policy issues—I have found when somebody tells me their opinion, that’s kind of uninteresting. Opinions are opinions. But what is profoundly interesting, at least to me, is not what you believe, but why you believe it. Let’s get under the hood. Let’s look at the work papers and find out whether what somebody believes, whether a proposition that somebody is advocating, has a foundation in objective facts, in science, whether it is defensible objectively or whether it is something akin to superstition.
Following the facts, following the science, has become pretty much a guiding rule for me in my conversations on my Sunday mornings with my guests. That principle more than ever will be guiding us this morning. This morning we will discuss, in the broadest sense of the word, gun control or gun elimination. We will not be discussing the Second Amendment. The principle we will discuss this morning, the points of view you will hear, are not points of view based upon the Second Amendment, although for sure the Second Amendment has a relevance in a conversation involving gun control. Of course it is relevant in general, but not relevant this morning. This morning we will examine the myths surrounding the gun control debate, the superstition surrounding the gun control debate, and the falsehoods presented to defend the point of view of those who would, if they had their way, take away or severely limit to the point of confiscation almost the use of guns by citizens in our country.
To help us understand the science behind a discussion of gun control, I’m delighted, proud, and quite fortunate to welcome to the show Dr. John Lott. John is an economist. He brings to this morning’s topic a scientific, economic, fact-driven point of view to the discussion of whether or not guns are the source—possession of guns, lawful possession of guns—are the source of America’s problems, at least insofar as crime and violent crime is concerned, or whether the absence of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens under appropriate controls, whether the absence of guns will add to our problems, not diminish them. John’s most recent book is Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, the Media, and Botched Studies Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control. That was published last year, just about a year ago. John’s earlier book, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws. That book was published about a year earlier in November of 2019. Those books are still in print, available on Amazon, and if you want to be informed on this subject, if you want to test the position you hold against the facts, those books are the books to read. John, welcome to the show this morning.
John Lott: Well, thanks very much for having me on. I appreciate it.
John Lott’s Background in Government and Economics [05:45]
Bob Zadek: And thanks, John, for all of your work in bringing sunlight into the shadows and the darkness of gun control myths. Now, John, you are an economist and you served in government in several capacities. I believe you were the chief economist on the Sentencing Commission a few years back. Tell us about your experience in government, why you were hired—if that’s the right word—selected to serve in government as an economist, and what you were asked to contribute to the conversation. You’re an economist, not a sociologist, not a criminologist. What you were asked to contribute to the conversation about gun control, what your experience was in government.
John Lott: Sure. Well, economists study lots of different areas. I’ve written in many different areas myself. But economics—one of the key points of economics is the notion that if something’s more costly, people do less of it. If the price of apples go up, people buy fewer apples. But it also applies to crime. If you make it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime, they’ll commit less crime. And there are other things that economists can do in terms of cost-benefit analysis. So if you want to go and try to figure out what the benefits and costs are for going and increasing certain penalties, economists can try to measure those types of things.
My first job in Washington was as chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission. That is the organization that sets the sentencing guidelines that federal judges are supposed to follow when they sentence criminals. And then more recently, this last year and the very beginning of this year, I was senior advisor for research and statistics in the Department of Justice. But I’ve also been an academic most of my life, had positions at Stanford, University of Chicago, the Wharton Business School, Yale. I’ve probably been in more different types of parts of academia than maybe anybody, I don’t know.
But I mean, there are lots of stories I could tell you about being in Washington. My first tour of duty was in the late 1980s, and then more recently I was just there. Things have changed. Overwhelmingly, the civil service was Democrats in both times, but they’re much more in your face, much more kind of deep state type now than they were in the 1980s. I can give you one story that kind of illustrates how things are these days, if you’re interested.
One of the things I wanted to work on when I got to Washington was the background check system, in particular the mistakes that are made and how that varies by the race and gender of the person who’s trying to buy a gun. So you’ll frequently hear claims about 3.8 million prohibited people that have been stopped from buying guns because of background checks. And that’s simply not accurate. What they should say is there’ve been 3.8 million initial denials, and that virtually all of those—something around 99% of those—are mistakes. When you buy a gun, you have to put down information about your race and gender, and so I know the data’s there to be able to go and back out and show who is facing the greatest mistakes.
So when I got to Washington last year, I talked to the people at the Bureau of Justice Statistics and they were interested in getting that. And so they approached the FBI, and the FBI said nobody’s interested in that. We don’t want to put that together. We don’t see any point in doing it. My response to them was, “You guys break down everything by race and gender. What’s the big deal? What’s the opposition to breaking this down by race and gender?” And so we argued back and forth for a little while about it, and then they just went silent and refused to respond to emails or phone calls for about a month. And then two days after the election, they get back to us and say that, “Well, you’ll have to fill out a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request.” This is one part of the Department of Justice asking another part of the Department of Justice for data. And it’s the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which it’s their job to go and get data from the FBI. Nobody had ever even heard of something like this happening before. But that’s not the only thing. Then they say, “Now not only do you have to fill out a FOIA request, but even if you could get it in today, there’s no way we could get the data done by January 20th, and we’re sure that the Biden administration will not be interested in this information, and so there’s no reason for you to even request it.”
The Reality of Background Check Errors [11:44]
Bob Zadek: Now let’s—we’ve talked about—I’m glad you started there because background checks are one of those policies that to citizens who don’t do a deep dive into matters of policy, but they rely upon others and they rely upon headlines and wherever they get their news. And background checks—I’m a gun control outsider, I don’t own a gun, I have a passing interest, of course, because I care about my own safety, but that’s about the extent of it. So to me, in that capacity, I hear “background checks” and I say to myself—and you’re going to fill in the economic, the behavioral blanks—I say to myself, “Well, that kind of seems a sensible policy. We ought to have some control on who gets to own a gun. After all, it’s commonly said we control who gets to drive a car. Nobody complains about driver’s licenses. That seems like a sensible use of governmental power.”
So you often mention in your book, you mention it for sure and in your public appearances, you mention and you discuss and you provide so much information on what in the abstract seems like a sensible policy. And in your discussion of background checks, you raise so many interesting and important issues, including adverse effects, racial disparity that’s a fact, including its goal of making inner cities and the rest of society safer. So help us understand, because there is so much misunderstanding about the common sense in the abstract principle of background checks, how has that policy been captured by those who are not driven by reducing crime—we’ll be discussing crime a lot—but are simply driven about the smaller policy of getting guns off the street, even if that has no effect or a negative effect upon crime. So help us understand the abuse of background checks and why it at worst contributes to the occasion of violent crime with guns rather than eliminates it, and its negative effects upon racial minorities.
John Lott: Sure. Well, look, I mean, everybody wants to stop dangerous people from getting a hold of weapons that they may use against other people. The problem is is that the current system’s a mess. As we were just talking about, you have almost 4 million Americans that have been stopped from buying guns because of background checks. And if you listen to the news media, they just kind of assume that all those are actually dangerous people that have been stopped, and nothing could be further from the truth.
When you buy a gun and you’re stopped, it goes through a series of kind of checks, and there are five stages of review when they deny somebody from getting a gun. The first stage is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms reviews the paperwork. No lawyers involved in the process. And about 94% of the cases are dropped at that stage. When you frequently hear—when Clinton was president, Republicans attacked him for not enforcing the gun control laws; when Bush was president, Democrats attacked him for not enforcing the gun control laws; when Obama was president, Republicans attacked him for not enforcing the gun control laws. But you go and the number one exhibit is: look at all these prohibited people that tried to buy a gun and were stopped. Well, that’s a felony each time a prohibited person tries to buy a gun and is stopped. And these are cases which are very easy to prosecute if they’re real cases.
And that is, let’s say you’ve been in prison for five years and you fill out the form, the 4473, and they ask, “Are you a convicted felon?” And if you put down “no” and you sign at the bottom and you say, under threat of perjury, “I’m attesting to everything being correct here,” this is like an incredibly easy thing to prosecute because you show your ID. It’s not like confusion over who you are that’s there. It’s not like you can go and claim, “I forgot I was in jail for five years.” These are—it’s hard to think of an easier case for the government to make than prosecuting these cases. And yet you just don’t see any prosecutions occurring. In 2017, there was something like 112,000 initial denials, and they had 12 prosecutions.
And even the people that they do prosecute are not what most people would think of as hardened criminals. I’ll give you one example I came across when I was in Washington, and that is a 63-year-old man. His wife had gotten threats. She was going to get a concealed handgun permit, and he decided as a gift he was going to go and buy her a handgun. And so he went in, tried to buy her a handgun. It turns out 40 years earlier, he had gotten—or 43 years earlier—he had gotten into a fistfight with his brother in their front yard. Neighbors had called the police. They had pleaded guilty to domestic violence misdemeanor, and that’s a prohibited offense. And he didn’t list it on the 4473 when he was filling it out. And so he committed a felony by doing it, and he was sentenced to three years in prison for perjury. Those are a lot—that’s a more extreme case, but there are a lot of cases that are like that for the tiny number that do get prosecuted.
But here—so there’s no reason why we should be having these mistakes. It’s one thing to stop a felon from buying a gun. It’s another thing to stop somebody simply because they have a name similar to a felon from buying a gun. When you fill it out, the 4473, you put down your name, your address, your Social Security number, your birthday, your race, your eye color, your gender. You think they’re using all that information. But what they usually use is roughly phonetically similar names and similar birthdays. And that creates all sorts of mistakes. If private companies when they do background checks on employees had an error rate that was 1/100th the error rate that the federal government has on your federal law, they’d be sued out of existence.
And for 20 years, I’ve just been pointing out to gun control advocates that they would have a much easier time getting these background checks on private transfers passed that they want to get passed if they would just make a couple reasonable changes to the law. One of them is having the federal government have to meet the same standards for doing background checks that private companies have to meet. I mean, if the federal government can demand that private companies have to meet certain standards, why isn’t that good enough for the federal government?
And the thing is, when you break it down by race and gender, I was able to see some of this data, but unfortunately they were unwilling to make this public for various reasons that we could talk about. What you find is that the error rate for Black males is more than three times their share of the population, and for Hispanic males, it’s like two and a half times their share of the population. The problem is people tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups. Hispanics have names similar to other Hispanics, Blacks tend to have names similar to other Blacks. 33% of Black males in the United States have a felony background, which prevents them from buying a gun. Whose names are their names most likely to be confused with? Other law-abiding, good Black males who want to be able to go and buy a gun to protect themselves and their families. And again, there’s no reason for these mistakes to be occurring.
The other big issue is just the cost. In Washington, D.C., where they’re voting on this stuff, it costs $125 to go and do a background check on a private transfer of a gun. That may not stop you or me, Bob, from being able to obtain a gun. But the very people that my research shows who benefit the most from owning guns—poor Blacks who live in high-crime urban areas, the people who are most likely victims of violent crime—having a gun there is very important to them in terms of being able to protect themselves and their families.
And you know, there are two points to make on this. One is, if you believe that background checks are good, presumably you want to encourage people to go and do these checks. How is making somebody have to pay $125 fee encouraging them to do it? Essentially, you’re taxing them for doing what you want them to do. That’s not how you encourage people to do it. If you want to encourage them, then at least consider picking up the costs that are there.
The Racial History of Gun Control [22:08]
Bob Zadek: As an aside, gun control laws have as part of their history an ugly, never-discussed-very-often racial component. The history of gun control laws in this country, like the history of minimum wage, like so many other apparently benign policy issues, have an ugly racial component—immigration. But we’re discussing gun control this morning. Gun control laws were initially enacted in order to prevent mostly Blacks, racial minorities, but Blacks were clearly the focus, to make it hard for Blacks to get guns. It’s clear from the history.
So here we have a statute that or a policy that finds its way into the system so that now it’s accepted unquestioned, when in reality it had an ugly beginning and today, as John, as you have pointed out, gun control laws have a profound—and I’d like you to speak about this because you have the data—gun control laws as a group of statutes taken together adversely affect inner-city minority communities much more than the suburbs. And tell us about the effect simply, if you can, the effect of gun control laws collectively and their effect upon the safety of inner cities, because I think the evidence is contrary to what our listeners might otherwise believe.
John Lott: Yeah, I mean, one doesn’t need to go over the history of this to see it, just current day. So if you look across the country, there is two or three general types of concealed carry laws. There’s “may-issue,” which you have in California and New York and New Jersey. There’s basically eight states with that. And then you have “right-to-carry” laws. And there’s two types of those. There’s 21 constitutional carry states where you don’t need to have a permit if you’re a law-abiding citizen and you’re legally able to own a gun, then you can carry without a permit. And then the rest, 21 states, are right-to-carry where if you’re a certain age, you pass criminal background check, you pay your fee, you get whatever training’s required, but once you meet those criteria, then it’s up to you whether or not to get a permit.
In the may-issue states, you have to meet those requirements, but then you also have to provide what they call a “good reason” for them giving you a permit. And I was able to get the list of everybody in Los Angeles County who had a concealed handgun permit a few years ago. There’s like 216 people that had a concealed handgun permit. And there are like 8 million adults in Los Angeles County. So it’s a tiny percentage. Nationwide, you have about 10% of the adult population has a concealed handgun permit, compared to just literally just a fraction of like a tenth or so of a percent in Los Angeles County.
But while nationwide you have about 30% of permit holders are women, in Los Angeles County it’s 7%. Nationwide, you have about 14% of concealed carry permit holders are Blacks; in Los Angeles County, it’s 5%. In Los Angeles County, about 54% of the population is Hispanic, and they only have about 6% of the permit holders are Hispanic. Now, is it just that in Los Angeles County women aren’t being threatened like they are in the rest of the country, they’re not being stalked, or Blacks aren’t facing crimes being committed against them in Los Angeles County? No. It’s just that the people, in this case overwhelmingly Democrats, who make the decision whether or not you have a good reason for getting a concealed handgun permit have decided that certain people give good reasons and other people don’t. And they’re not willing to go and accept the reasons that women or Blacks do for permits. The type of people that you see outside of, let’s say, judges or prosecutors that they give permits to are basically very wealthy, very politically connected white males who tend to give large campaign donations to people like the sheriff.
And you know, that’s fine. I’m glad that they’re able to go and get protection. But as mentioned earlier, the very people who are most likely victims of violent crime—poor Blacks who live in high-crime urban areas or poor Hispanics who live in high-crime urban areas—are out of luck. For them to go and say, “I live in a very dangerous area and I’m worried about my safety,” that’s not the type of good reason that they will approve of.
But it’s more than just that. You can see differences in right-to-carry states also because of the fees and training requirements and other rules that they can impose to make it difficult and costly for people to get a concealed handgun permit. You can look at Illinois and Indiana. Illinois, obviously, a democratically controlled state; Indiana, very heavily Republican state. In Illinois, only about 3% of adults have concealed handgun permits. In Indiana, it’s over 20%. Why the difference? It’s pretty easy to explain. In Illinois, it costs about $450 to go through the process to get a concealed handgun permit. In Indiana, it’s $12.95.
And it’s more than just the percent of the population. It’s also the mix. In Illinois, it’s very heavily white males who live in the suburbs. In Indiana, you see many more individuals who live in high-crime urban areas with zip codes that are heavily Black. And Illinois does all sorts of things beyond just the cost of getting it. They don’t allow you to take a permit concealed handgun on public transportation. Up until very recently, there was no training facilities in Chicago. So if you were a poor Black who lived in Chicago and didn’t own a car, you’d have to go and borrow somebody’s car to go and travel well outside the city on either two to four days because they had 16 hours of training that were required. And you know, it’s kind of like they went through and did a checklist of everything they possibly could to make it so that poor Blacks who lived in high-crime areas of Chicago would be unable to go and get a permit. I mean, there’s other things we could go through, but that kind of gives you a flavor.
Gun Bans and Murder Rates [30:15]
Bob Zadek: Let’s get to the heart of it and the heart of your research. After all, I introduced this morning’s show and my guest promising we were going to look to the science, look to the data, and this will not be just a show advocating a certain principle, but rather a fact-based discussion. So the core issue is, there is this mythology that Americans are safer to the extent that we can increase the difficulty of owning a gun in general—and of course we can drill it down to what kind of gun: automatic, semi-automatic weapons, concealed handguns, and the like. We can break it down. But the statistics that you explain in your book are so overwhelming. Give us—because we, regretfully, this should be a semester, not an hour show—but making the best use of time that we can, help us understand what you have learned, the data, the objective data about the relationship between—and I’ll say it very broadly, but you can take any subset, any smaller data set to make your point—the relationship between safety of Americans with stricter and stricter gun control laws versus their safety. And I’m using very general terms very broadly to give you a chance to pick the most important statistics in support of your position. Are we safer with more stringent gun control laws than without it, or is the opposite the case?
John Lott: I think police are the single most important factor my research indicates for protecting people. But police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after a crime’s occurred. And the question becomes what people should do when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves. And it turns out, just as you can make it riskier for criminals to go and commit crimes with higher arrest rates or higher conviction rates or longer prison sentences, the fact that a would-be victim might be able to defend themselves can also make it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime.
Now, you know, when you talk about the popular discussion for the question that you’re raising, often you’ll see discussions that will be like this: say, “Well, look, compare the UK homicide rate to the United States. The UK has a very low homicide rate compared to the United States, and they have very strict gun control and very few people are able to own guns in the UK. So it must be the fact that they have very strict gun control laws that causes the low homicide rate.”
What there are very few academics that make purely cross—what we call cross-sectional comparisons, looking at different places at one point in time. And this kind of really, you know, gives an example for why that’s dangerous to do that. Because the thing is, if you look before the UK had its strict gun control laws, they had actually even lower homicide rates. After they had things like the January ‘97 handgun ban, over the next eight years, the homicide rate in the UK went up by 50%. It only went down again after that after they had a huge increase, about 18% increase in the number of police officers.
So the thing is, what I would suggest that people look at is this question, and that is: can you name me one place in the world that’s banned either all guns or all handguns and seen murder rates go down or even stay the same? Because I can’t find it. Every single place, every single time that you’ve seen either all guns or all handguns banned, murder rates have gone up. You would think out of randomness it would be easy to go and find at least a couple places where murder rates went down or at least stayed the same. And you would think surely if guns on net are bad, that should happen all the time. But you just don’t see it happening.
You know, in the United States, we’ve had a couple experiments like this with regard to Chicago and Washington, D.C., where all handguns were banned. People know that murder rates and violent crime rates soared after those bans went into effect. Gun control advocates, though, will respond and say, “Well, that wasn’t really a fair test because unless you go and you ban guns every place, people can still get guns from the rest of Illinois or from Indiana or from Maryland or Virginia.” A few problems with that argument. One is, it doesn’t really explain why murder rates and violent crime rates rose so dramatically after the ban. Because presumably criminals could have gotten guns from those other places to begin with. It may explain why it didn’t fall like gun control advocates were promising, but doesn’t explain the increase that occurred.
And you know, besides that, it would have been nice if gun control advocates knew in advance that this wasn’t a fair test. It would have been nice if they would have kind of told people that when they were passing the laws that they thought that they would actually be counterproductive. But the third point is, we can actually look around the world. There are whole nations that have banned guns. There are island nations that have banned guns. And you would think that an island nation banning a gun would be kind of the perfect experiment. There’s no neighbor that you can easily go and blame for supplying guns. They have easily defendable borders that are there when you’re an island nation. You look around the world and even island nations have seen huge increases in murders and violent crime after they’ve had gun bans put into effect.
And there’s a simple thing that’s going on there, and that is when you ban guns, it’s the most law-abiding, good citizens who obey the rules, not the criminals. And to the extent that that occurs, you actually make it easier for criminals to go and commit crimes. There’s lots of other evidence we could go into. But here’s the bottom line: this point doesn’t just apply to gun bans, though that’s a simple thing to go and look at, it’s like a clear, clear change that you see. It applies to any type of gun control law where you’re making it relatively more costly for law-abiding citizens relative to criminals to be able to go and obtain guns. You have to be careful that you’re not passing rules that are primarily going to disarm law-abiding citizens relative to criminals.
But you know, even if one wants to go and kind of limit yourself to cross-sectional data—and I spend a fair amount of time in my book Gun Control Myths on this too—that what you find is that the countries that have the highest gun ownership rates clearly tend to have the lowest murder and homicide rates. Some of the countries with by far the highest murder rates have effectively banned guns. I mean, you have Mexico, for example. Since 1972, Mexico’s had one gun store in the country. The most powerful gun that you can legally buy in Mexico is a .22 caliber short-round rifle. It’s not the type of gun that the gangs are using down there. If you look at the legally licensed data, they have literally less than like two-tenths of 1% of the adult population is legally licensed to own a gun in Mexico. And yet they have a murder rate that’s like six times higher than the murder rate that we’ve had in the United States. Brazil, similarly, has a similar extremely low legal gun ownership rate, and yet they’ve also had a murder rate that’s about six times higher than what we have in the United States. If you look across all the countries that we have data for, the United States is well below the average murder rate and well below the median murder rate—or homicide rate, I should say—across countries.
And one other point: people confuse homicides and murders. They use the two terms interchangeably and they’re not. Homicides are murders plus justifiable homicides. And it’s never really been obvious to me why you want to go and lump in justifiable homicides with murders. There’s a big difference to me from a robber killing somebody in the course of a robbery, or a woman fatally shooting a serial rapist who breaks into her home at 2:00 AM in the morning. The United States appears to have a lot more justifiable homicides than most countries do. And so that tends to make us look relatively worse than other countries when you use homicides. The thing is, there are very few countries that report murder data. And there are lots of other issues that we could go through there, but I’m happy to talk more about it.
Mass Shootings and Gun-Free Zones [40:43]
Bob Zadek: You make an important point in your book, a very interesting and I think important distinction that I’ll ask you to speak briefly to. We have in our country, in general, lots of what I will call “gun-free zones”—universities, churches, malls, perhaps, I’m not sure about that. But there are areas where even if you can in general have a concealed carry or carry a gun or own a gun, you cannot bring it into these special areas designated by statute, gun-free zones. And then we have on the other part of my question, we have these mass killings. Again, every time there’s a mass killing, that is cited as anecdotal support for failures of existing gun control laws and therefore we need more gun control laws. You have pointed out in your book statistically a relationship that’s counterintuitive to those who would advocate for stricter gun control, that’s counterintuitive because the relationship between mass killings and gun-free zones which show how gun-free zones in general and gun control more generally contribute to crime rather than prevent it. Speak to that relationship because there’s so much in the news about the relationship between the effect of gun-free zones on how they encourage or discourage mass killings as the media describes it. I think a mass killing is more than four people are killed in one incident, but I could be wrong about that.
John Lott: Yeah, right. Traditionally it’s been four or more people that are killed. So anyway, look, these people, these mass public shooters, may be crazy in some sense, but they’re not stupid. Their goal is to try to get media attention. You have people usually who want to go and commit suicide, but they want to go and commit suicide in a way that’s going to get them attention. And they know, and you read this in their diaries, you read this in other statements that they leave behind, they know that the more people they can kill, the more media attention that they’re going to get. And so what they do is they pick venues where they don’t have to worry about people defending themselves.
94% of these mass public shootings take place in areas where civilians are banned from having guns. And you know, even if you have a police officer, one police officer that might be there, they have an incredibly difficult job. If you have one person in uniform and they’re the only person that people know has a gun, who do you think these attackers go after first if they’re going to go and do the attack there? They go after the officer and try to kill them because they know that once they subdue the officer that’s there, they’re going to have free rein to go after other people.
I think the entire debate that we have right now on guns would be dramatically different if a couple things occurred. One is once in a while the media would mention that we’ve had yet another mass public shooting in a place where civilians were banned from having guns. The media will frequently very quickly talk about what guns that were used or how they think the person obtained the guns—often the initial news stories are wrong—but the easiest thing for them to go and check that they just refuse to go and mention is whether or not the attack occurred in a place where guns are banned. My guess is the debate would be very different now if they would regularly mention that even once in a while in their news stories.
The other thing is, there are attempted mass public shootings in places that aren’t gun-free zones. But it’s amazing how frequently they’re stopped. On our website at crimeresearch.org—and again, I have a chapter in Gun Control Myths on this—you can find dozens of cases in recent years where what would have been a successful mass public shooting was stopped because somebody had a permit concealed handgun. And you know, the thing is, they just don’t get national news coverage when they occur.
I’ll give you a few examples just to show. People probably remember the Pulse nightclub shooting near Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were killed. It was at a nightclub. A week later, there was a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina. The big difference between the two attacks was Florida was one of 10 states that banned people having permit concealed handguns in establishments that got more than 50% of their revenue from serving alcohol. South Carolina was one of the 40 states that allowed people to be able to carry concealed handguns in those types of places. The attacker in South Carolina had shot three people, was shooting at a fourth person when a person with a permit concealed handgun seriously shot and seriously wounded the attacker. You will search in vain to find national news stories about that case in South Carolina. You would think people were just sensitized to an attack at a nightclub and this would be national news coverage, but it wasn’t.
Or take the Parkland shooting. Just months after that attack in Florida, not very far from Parkland, there was an attack at a gathering for an elementary school. They had a gathering at a park right next to the school. And a man came up, started shooting. There were hundreds of students that were there plus their parents. Fortunately, there was a vendor that was there who had his permit concealed handgun and shot and seriously wounded the attacker and stopped the attacker before anybody was shot. But again, you only saw local news coverage on this.
And the amazing thing is the few times over the last five years where there’s been any mention of an attack that’s been stopped by a concealed carry permit holder, the media botches the stories time after time. I’ll give you one particularly egregious case. You had the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Just three days later, you had an attack at a grocery store, a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky. A man had gone into a grocery store, started shooting Blacks. And what got the national news attention was the murderer had turned to a customer and said, “Whites don’t shoot whites.” And the way it was played in the media was, here this murderer was assuring this white customer that he had nothing to worry about because they were both white and he wasn’t going to shoot him. What was left out of places like NBC, Meet the Press, other places, was the first part of the quote. The murderer actually said to the customer, “Please don’t shoot me. Whites don’t shoot whites.” So this white murderer was actually pleading with this customer who had a permit concealed handgun that he was pointing at the murderer and begging the customer not to shoot the murderer. They did exchange fire. The murderer was seriously wounded, got in his car, drove about a mile away before he passed out and the police were able to go and catch him after he had passed out in his car because of the wounds that he had.
But at the time, I was able to text back and forth with Chuck Todd, the moderator for Meet the Press, and I said, “Chuck, you just spent like five minutes on this story, but I think the way you got it—because he was focusing on the racial aspect, you know, this racist doing it—and I said the story was more complicated because here you had a white customer coming to the aid of these Blacks who were being shot and heroically stopped the attacker there. And it just seems like you may want to correct it because here’s the local media, because the national media completely botched the story by leaving out the first part of the murderer’s quote there.” And I suggested maybe next week he could go and kind of correct the record on that. And I’d given him multiple local Louisville news sources to show the full quote that was there, but you know, he wasn’t interested. And I could give you a couple other examples.
Conclusion: Fact-Based Opinions [50:34]
Bob Zadek: The subtext in what you said is there’s been so much written about censorship, Twitter and the like and Facebook censoring. And the subtext which you have mentioned more than once is we are all, we the consuming public, have been victimized by distorted media reports which are important in helping us form our decisions about how we feel about gun control. And your work, John, at the Crime Prevention Research Center and your books help us get the facts so we can make a much more informed decision. So we are all—we being me and everybody else who even to some degree consumes mainstream media information—are being manipulated. And all I implore people, and I hope this is the message of this show, that if you’re going to form an opinion, have it be an informed opinion which is fact-based.
John, we’re running out of time and I want to just point out to our audience, you have founded the Crime Prevention Research Center, which is a fact-based website. So John, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time. People can find more at your website at crimeresearch.org. But thank you.
John Lott: Thank you.
Bob Zadek: Thanks so much, John. And thank you to my friends for listening. Have a nice day, John, and have a nice day to my friends out there.
John Lott: Thank you.