CPRC in the News: Forbes, Daily Caller, New York Sun, Media Resource Center, and many more
Polls show that 80% of Americans support requirements for a voter ID, including a photograph. Senator Manchin’s substitute bill does not require photo ID. You could use a utility bill or banking statement. A study by economist John Lott finds that 46 of 47 European countries require a government issued photo ID to vote. Great Britain is an exemption but Prime Minister Boris Johnson is about to make photo ID’s mandatory. . . .
Lawrence Kudlow, “Passing S1 Plus Filibuster Repeal Would Mean It’s ‘Katy, Bar the Door’,” The New York Sun, June 23, 2021.
Dr. John Lott, Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) recently released a paper written while he was a Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy.
His paper, Corrections to the FBI’s Reports on Active Shooting Incidents (May 31, 2021), examines the FBI’s previously released reports on “active shooter incidents” (ASI). The FBI defines an “active shooter” as one or more individuals attempting to kill or killing other people in a populated area. “Implicit in this definition is the shooter’s use of one or more firearms. The ‘active’ aspect of the definition inherently implies the ongoing nature of the incidents, and thus the potential for the response to affect the outcome.”
The FBI published its initial report in 2014, titled A Study of Active Shooter Incidents Between 2000-2013, using information from “104 police department records, after action reports, shooting commission reports, open sources, and FBI resources.” Since then, the agency has published additional annual or bi-annual reports. As stated in the initial report, the goal of these studies is “to provide federal, state and local law enforcement with data so they can better understand how to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from these incidents.”
According to Dr. Lott, “all five reports so far issued were found to have serious errors.” These distort the trend of attacks over time and the evidence on factors that may be important in curtailing attacks in the future.
The premise of the FBI’s initial report was that a drastic increase in ASIs occurred between 2000 and 2013, escalating from one incident in 2000 to 17 in 2013. However, Dr. Lott’s paper indicates that the FBI failed to include twenty incidents in that time span, and that these “missing cases were three times more likely to have occurred from 2000-2006 than from 2007-2013, thus exaggerating the increase that was widely reported on.” Once these cases are included and placed in the context of pre-2000 data, it becomes evident that there “has only been a slight, statistically insignificant upward trend over the 38 years from 1977 through 2014,” and even this slight uptick is due to high numbers in a single year (2012). . . .
Staff, “’Serious Errors’ In FBI Reports Of Shooting Incidents,” Daily Caller, June 15, 2021.
Overall, gun policies in state capitols, even after the January riot in Washington, remain split. About 30 state capitols employ metal detectors, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Conversely, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, a pro-gun research group, about 23 capitols officially allow carrying legal firearms inside.
Elaine S. Povich, “Post-insurrection, states balance capitol security, openness,” Tyler Morning Telegram, June 17, 2021; Bakersfield, June 17, 2021; Route-fifty, June 16, 2021; East Oregonian, June 21, 2021.
Ironically, the very month of the Columbine massacre, the Law School of the University of Chicago published a paper concluding precisely the opposite of what the Democrats were saying. In “Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws,” economist and political commentator John Lott and University of Chicago Law professor William Landes claimed to have discerned a distinct advantage in allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns in public places. They said it is this: If a perpetrator believes that victims and bystanders may be well-armed, he or she may elect to keep quarrels private and victim counts low. In other words, allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons might prohibitively raise the potential personal “cost” of a multi-victim shooting to any perpetrator.
In which case, bloodletting would be no bargain.
To arrive at their position, Lot and Landes analyzed news reports of multiple-victim public shootings that occurred in the United States between 1977 and 1995 and that seemed to have been conceived and executed in a way to maximize carnage. The researchers excluded from their data gang-on-gang shootings. They explained this choice by pointing out that those crimes’ perpetrators would have assumed that their shootings’ victims and bystanders carried guns regardless of what state law dictated. Ditto for assaults by and on members of organized crime.
From their selective data set, Lot and Landes determined that, on both an absolute and per capita basis, states with strict gun laws had dramatically more deaths and injuries from public multiple shootings than did states in which civilians could easily and legally arm themselves.
From 1977-1995, the eighteen-year period from which Lott and Landes drew their numbers, data pointed increasingly in the “fewer guns equals more deaths” direction. Fourteen states loosened their gun control laws during that period. This brought the percentage of the national population living in states allowing average citizens to carry concealed weapons much higher. And as this demographic shift occurred, there was “a sharp drop in multiple murders and injuries per 100,000 persons …. Murders fell by 89% and injuries by 82%.”
Rebecca Coffey, :School Shootings Are Up In 2021. Who Are The Killers In Our Midst?,: Forbes, June 28, 2021.
Thus we get the declaration that violent crime and gun homicides/suicides went down immediately after the ‘ban’ took nearly 20 percent of Aussie guns off ‘the streets’, as some have claimed.
The trouble is, it’s not true that violent crime, or even gun-related crime, decreased immediately after the gun ban. This is a case of temporal manipulation to reach a desired conclusion. In fact, gun-related crime increased for years after the 1996 ‘ban,’ and the only way disputants can claim that violent crime decreased is by widening the window of time beyond 10 years.
As John Lott has correctly noted, violent crime increased immediately after the ‘ban,’ and homicides and armed robberies continued the upward trend until 2000, never dropping below 1996 levels until after 2010 (in the case of armed robberies, they still hadn’t gone below 1996 levels by 2010). . . .
P. Gardner Goldsmith, “CA City Mandates VIDEO RECORDING ALL GUN BUYS,” Media Research Center, June 18, 2021
Change the Ref was founded by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, parents of a boy killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting. The video is called the “The Lost Class.” Powerful! Clever! Also dishonest, unfair, disrespectful, unforgivably unethical and one more thing: signature significance. A group that would do this is untrustworthy. Nothing it says or publishes can be trusted; none of its arguments can be taken at face value; none of its statistics or analysis can be relied upon by anyone. With this video and its abuse of Lott and Keene, Change the Ref exposes itself as practicing “by any means possible” warfare, not legitimate policy advocacy. It believes that the ends justify the means—their ends. It is a perfect match for the current progressive movement, which has taken an ominous turn to totalitarian strategies with its full embrace of Alinskyism.
“Ironically, had the men conducted a proper background check on the school, they would have seen that the school is fake,” a smug Change the Ref spokesperson said in a press release. Gee, that sounds a lot like Otter telling Flounder in “Animal House,” “You fucked yup! You trusted us!”
Oh, I get it! See, he’s analogizing checking to see if someone you have generously agreed to do a favor for to enhance a graduation ceremony is a liar with requiring background checks to purchase a gun! Yes, that’s representative of the logic and intellectual rigor of anti-gun activists, just as this indefensible scam nicely illustrates the kinds of people and organizations attempting to gut the Second Amendment using misrepresentations, appeals to emotion, exaggerated statistics, fearmongering and lies. Incidentally, a Google cache shows that a website was created to help ensure the scam’s success. . . .
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a tweeted that the fake graduation trick was “brilliant.” Again, good to know. She is ruthless and unethical, and winning a debate fairly isn’t important to her. If her organization and its members don’t force her to recant or resign, we know all that is necessary o know about them, too. Nicole Hockley, a mother of a student killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, also pronounced the trick “brilliance.” . . .
Jack Marshall, “What Its Fraudulent Anti-Gun Video Reveals About “Change the Ref”And Everyone Applauding it,: Ethics Alarms, June 24, 2021.
The claim that the Australian NFA prevented mass murders is also misleading. America has developed a culture of mass murder due to the creation of gun-free zone laws. John Lott is very firm about the cure:
He said, “98% of mass public shootings since 1950 have occurred in places where citizens are banned from having guns…we need to get rid of gun-free zones.”
Alan J Chwick and Joanne D Eisen, “Biden Democrats: Want The Failed Australian Gun Ban Plan,” Ammoland, June 23, 2021.
In a 2017 report, the Crime Prevention Research Center found that 68 percent of killings occurred in just 5 percent of the nation’s counties. Even in these counties, homicides tended to be concentrated in small pockets of the district. The report also established that areas with the highest gun ownership rates tended to have the lowest murder rates.
Andrew Miller, “Everything is moving in the direction of violence and civil war,” Trumpet, June 24, 2021.
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