CPRC in the News: Orange County Register, PEW, Business & Politics Review, Townhall, and more
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,” PEW, June 16, 2021.
The 2020 presidential election was unprecedented in many ways, the most glaring of which was the allowance of lax voting rules and mail-in ballots. And now Democrats are pushing to make this change permanent because of what they claim is racist voter “suppression.”
A new report from RealClearInvestigations, however, points to the benefits of strict voter ID laws as evidenced by results among America’s allies in Europe and other countries.
Across Europe, voter photo identification is mandatory and helps protect election integrity and public confidence in the results. John Lott Jr. runs the Crime Prevention Research Center and studies election integrity measures. In his survey of 47 European nations, all but one– the U.K.– requires government-issued photo voter ID to vote. However, the U.K. has recently introduced legislation to implement voter ID.
The 2020 presidential election was unprecedented in many ways, the most glaring of which was the allowance of lax voting rules and mail-in ballots. And now Democrats are pushing to make this change permanent because of what they claim is racist voter “suppression.”
A new report from RealClearInvestigations, however, points to the benefits of strict voter ID laws as evidenced by results among America’s allies in Europe and other countries.
Across Europe, voter photo identification is mandatory and helps protect election integrity and public confidence in the results. John Lott Jr. runs the Crime Prevention Research Center and studies election integrity measures. In his survey of 47 European nations, all but one– the U.K.– requires government-issued photo voter ID to vote. However, the U.K. has recently introduced legislation to implement voter ID. . . .
Kay Apfel, “America reportedly an ‘outlier’ in voter photo ID requirements compared to Europe, other nations,” Business & Politics, June 4, 2021.
As gun scholar John Lott details in his book “More Guns, Less Crime” and other works, the more honest citizens carrying guns, the more criminals fear to commit violent crimes. What about some of the shocking crimes suffered recently in OC and across America? Lott points out the violence usually ends when the first person with a gun shows up to stop a perpetrator.
John Seller, “Standing up for the Second Amendment in Orange County,” Orange County Register, June 4, 2021
So much ‘Jim Crow’ voter suppression. And the lone outlier government — the recently Brexited UK — has proposed a new law to institute ID requirements at the polls, too. Via Real Clear Investigations, a further piece of support for why common-sense integrity measures like this, while angrily decried by American ‘progressives,’ are in fact widely popular among normal people. It’s beyond reasonable to ask voters to confirm their identity and eligibility prior to allowing them to cast a ballot. Such commonplace provisions are the rule, not the exception among Western democracies:
Guy Benson, “Study: 46 Out of 47 European Countries Require Photo ID to Vote,” Townhall.com, June 4, 2021.
John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center appeared on the KGVO Talk Back program on Thursday to answer questions from listeners and talk about his work.
Lott, whose many books and articles often deal with firearms, said he has been researching the growth of ‘constitutional carry’ laws throughout the U.S.
“I’ve been dealing with constitutional carry in a number of states,” said Lott. “There are now 21 states that have it. Obviously Montana passed it earlier this year. There’s a Supreme Court case that’s coming up later this year that’s going to be dealing with concealed carry from New York, where New York is one of seven states where you have to give good cause a good reason for why you get a permit.”
Lott said states with high crime rates are also the ones with the lowest percentage of legal gun ownership.
“California, New York, those states only have about three tenths of 1% of their population with a permit,” he said. “In the rest of the country, it’s like 10% of the adult population. So what the Supreme Court’s going to say is do you have a good reason to be able to grant somebody a permit to carry or not. So we’re going to be working on that.”
Lott said gun-free zones are the most attractive places for attacks by persons with firearms, and always have been.
“Who’s going to obey those rules? The law abiding good people who you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “The people you were talking about will obey the rules. The criminals though, actually are attracted to those areas where guns are banned. Because if you want to go and create a lot of harm, if you want to go and kill lots of people, like these mass public shootings, you go to a place where your victims are defenseless and not able to protect themselves.”. . .
Peter Christian, “John Lott with Crime Prevention Research Center on Talk Back,” KGVO, June 11, 2021. Also Politics 406, June 10, 2021.
2020 also saw about 820,000 people join the ranks of permitted or licensed concealed carriers in the U.S., according to a report from the Crime Prevention Research Center.
All in all, about 7.6 percent of American adults have carry permits. Outside of the eight states with heavy restrictions on concealed carry permitting, the CPRC estimates 9.2 percent of the population has a permit.
David McCar, “There Is Far More to Concealed Carry Than Just Buying a Handgun,” Outdoor Life, June 10, 2021.
Overall, gun policies in state capitols, even after the January riot in Washington, remain split, Pew researchers detail. About 30 state capitols employ metal detectors, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. To that end, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, a pro-gun research group, about 23 capitols officially allow carrying legal firearms inside, Pew uncovered.
Andrea Cipriano, “Overall, gun policies in state capitols, even after the January riot in Washington, remain split,” The Crime Report, June 16, 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).
Subsequent FBI reports (2015-2019) carried forward the error of missing cases. These are of particular interest as the FBI “repeatedly excludes” cases where an armed citizen had intervened. In at least six missing cases in 2018-19 identified by Dr. Lott, a concealed handgun permit holder stopped the attacker, including an incident in Tumwater, Washington in which three concealed carry permittees confronted and killed an attacker. Another case in 2018 had been counted by the FBI but without indicating that a private individual with a concealed handgun permit stopped the attack. (Details of all of the missing cases are provided in the paper.)
These amendments to the FBI statistics give a considerably different view of interventions by individuals with carry permits. The FBI had previously reported that between 2014 and 2019, civilians with permitted concealed handguns stopped an attack in nine out of 145 cases (6.2%); as corrected, the figure more than doubles to over 15 percent. The paper notes that future enhancements to these figures are possible: “[a]dditional concealed carry cases missed by the FBI prior to 2014 are likely, but a search has not yet been conducted for them.”
Another factor that skews the information in the reports is the FBI’s inconsistent approach and selective inclusion of cases. When errors in the initial report were pointed out in 2015, the FBI apparently acknowledged that the data was “imperfect” but, essentially, some data was better than none. Regarding later reports, the agency maintained that several of the missing cases did not meet its criteria, even though the cases meet its definition of an ASI and the FBI had included similar cases in its dataset. The FBI’s response included a statement that for “some cases, a level of interpretation is required with which all may not agree.”
Obviously, the ability of persons lawfully carrying firearms to stop attacks depends on whether any particular location is a “gun free zone.” Conversely, active shooters may choose a location based on the reduced likelihood of others present being armed and able to resist. The FBI researchers, though, avoid examining the rate at which ASIs occur in “gun free zones.” While it is not always possible to determine whether a location is a “gun free zone,” whether individuals may legally carry in the place remains a relevant consideration in assessing ASIs and presumably, reacting to and potentially preventing such crimes. The paper points out that between 2014 and 2019, the vast majority of mass public shootings happened in places where carrying by ordinary citizens was prohibited – 73% of mass public shootings where four or more people were murdered, and 64% of the active shooting attacks in public places, occurred in “gun free zones.”
Dr. Lott’s paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of accurate, comprehensive data, free of any bias against incidents in which bystanders lawfully carrying firearms intervene to prevent additional bloodshed. Otherwise, publicly funded government research runs the risk of crossing the line between fact and fiction, distorting results to yield a preferred narrative at the expense of trust and credibility. This, as Dr. Lott notes, defeats the very purpose for which the data is collected and studied. “Without accurate data, we can’t adequately analyze the life-and-death consequences of different policies. We will miss the right solutions. Letting people control the data lets them control the political debate.”
Staff, “‘Serious Errors’ in FBI Reports of Shooting Incidents,” NRA-ILA, Monday, June 14, 2021
Of course, most people who follow the Second Amendment debate closely know that, in fact, more guns do not lead to more violence, as researcher John Lott proved back in 1998. Lott, who is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), found that states with the largest increases in gun ownership also tend to have the largest drops in violent-crime rates. . . .
Mark Chesnut, “The Second Amendment Isn’t Behind the Rising Crime Rate,” America’s 1st Freedom, June 13, 2021.
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