CPRC in the News: Instapundit, Powerline, 1819 News, Zero Hedge, Real Clear Politics, American Greatness, and much more
According to gun expert and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) John Lott, who served as the senior advisor for Research and Statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and then the Office of Legal Policy in the U.S. Department of Justice during the Trump administration, suggesting that permitless carry creates more violent crime flies in the face of the evidence.
“The opposite has been the case,” Lott told 1819 News. “The attorney general in Ohio did a more sophisticated study, and most of the major urban areas had a drop in gun crime and violent crime after they instituted Constitutional carry. Look, there are all sorts of things that affect the crime rate. My own research indicates that policing is the most important single factor for doing that.”
Montgomery has certainly faced issues with policing. Just recently, the police chief resigned amidst allegations of sexual misconduct. That, combined with a shifting public opinion of the city’s leadership, has also led to a significantly diminished police force. Many former Montgomery cops told 1819 Newsthat they and others left after they believed Reed wrongfully blamed an MPD officer for a 2016 officer-involved shooting that took the life of a black man and sent the white officer to prison.
“Often, what you see is politicians want to blame somebody else. They make policies that make it harder for police to go and do their job, and their response is, rather than accepting the culpability that they have, is to go and blame somebody else,” Lott said. “Even if they hire to replace the older police they lose, it’s not the same. If you lose somebody who has 15 years of experience and replace him with somebody who’s been on the job for six months, the new guy is not going to be as effective as the guy you lost. It’s going to take several years to make up for that. So there’s a real cost to doing that.”
He continued, “It’s also related to how progressive the leadership is. Look at Florida, for example; they’ve had no problem with losing police. They had police moving from other states to move to Florida. When you have it so that police think that their job is more difficult for many reasons, you’ll lose police in those places and make it difficult to replace them.” “…If you have a very progressive mayor, my guess is that there’s a good chance the district attorney is also fairly progressive. And if that’s the case, you could have a situation where police arrest someone, and nothing happens to them. They get released, so police think, ‘What’s the point?’”
While Lott acknowledged that violent crime is a multifaceted problem, he claims data shows a fairly straightforward way to deter crime.
“To me, it’s pretty straightforward: if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to commit crimes with higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, and longer prison sentences. You can also make it riskier for them to commit crimes by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves. The irony is that the same people who don’t want law enforcement to do its job are the same ones who don’t want individuals to be able to protect themselves.” . . .
As author and researcher John Lott Jr. noted last week regarding the leaked manifesto;
The fight over obtaining the murderer’s diary also received news attention. But when “nearly four dozen pages” of the murderer’s diary were finally released last week, the mainstream media completely ignored it. It turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release. Some Covenant School parents also opposed releasing the diary because it would force families to re-live the nightmare. The Tennessee Star’s parent company, Star News Digital Media, successfully filed two lawsuits to obtain the diary.
Five days after the release of the diary, with the exception of the New York Post, which is a national news outlet, the news coverage was limited to seven other conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire and Newsbusters.
The school murderer was transgender, and her diary reveals a suicidal left-winger who hated whites. The FBI expressed concern that the release of the diary from a transgender person could lead the public “to dismiss the attacker as mentally ill,” which would “further permeate the false narrative that the majority of attackers are mentally ill.” It worried that the diary could “potentially inflam[e] the public.”
The FBI worried that releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press.
But there is a lot of important information in the diary. As is very typical of mass public shooters, the murderer was suicidal: “A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of. I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.” She was also on the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, whose potential side effects include “abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.”
The FBI worries that the diary will help create a link in people’s minds between mass murderers and mental illness, but suicidal people presumably have some mental health problems. Nor should the link be particularly surprising given that the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that 51% of mass public shooters in the last 25 years were actually seeing mental health care professionals before their attacks. That is 2.5 times the rate in the general public. . . .
. . . but as John Lott notes, “it turns out that behind the scenes, the FBI had fought hard against the diary’s release.”
According to the FBI’s Behavioral Threat Assessment Center (BTAC), releasing the diary could have “unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories, which will undoubtedly abound.” Self-professed “experts,” the FBI fears, will “proffer their perspectives” in the press. As Lott sees it, “the news media and the FBI under the Biden administration are attempting to control the information available to Americans about a mentally troubled woman who identified as a man. The Biden administration is free to argue against linking transgender issues to mental illness or mass murder, but censoring the information is not the right approach.” Americans also have a right to wonder why the FBI was involved in the first place. . . .
Lloyd Billingsley, “TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS,” Powerline, June 16, 2024.
The Supreme Court’s decision on the Bump Stock ban “was more of a victory for the rule of law than anything else. The BATF was trying to expand the scope of its regulatory powers well beyond what the law allowed it to do. The Supreme Court, with its current composition, more than any other court in my lifetime, is trying to limit the regulatory powers of government agencies to what the law granted them, not what might be politically popular regulations at any point in time.” Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., Crime Prevention Research Center, Sat 6/15/2024 6:55 AM. . . .
Robert Beard, “The Supreme Court Steps Up but Then Disappoints,” Jefferson Blog, June 20, 2024.
John Lott has repeatedly proven an armed presence reduces the chances – and opportunities – for deadly gunfire. Why do banks, stores, soldiers, celebrities, and the very same politicians who would disarm you are all surrounded by men with guns for their protection? 32 states still require you to have a permission slip. School children must settle for Gun Free School Zone signs because the teachers union, school officials and, sadly, too many parents don’t like ‘the look’ of armed security in their schools; it’s a sign of their failure to protect students. Do they prefer the dead bodies of children and teachers instead? Off-duty policemen are more readily available than waiting on unconstitutional legislative efforts to deny – or now ‘postpone’ – individuals from having the natural right of self-defense enshrined in the 2nd Amendment. History and statistics expose failure and tragedy wherever those efforts have been successful. . . .
BRIAN WILSON, “So Now It’s a ‘Public Health Issue’?,” Substack, June 25, 2024.
As John Lott, economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate, wrote at the time, “You might think that it was the one closest to the killer’s apartment. Or that it was the one with the largest audience. Yet, neither explanation is right. Instead, out of all the movie theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment showing the new Batman movie that night, it was the only one where guns were banned. In Colorado, individuals with permits can carry concealed handguns in most malls, stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. But private businesses can determine whether permit holders can carry guns on their private property.” . . .
Larry Sand, “Pistol Packing Pedagogues,” American Greatness, June 20, 2024.
When it comes to what people think of when they hear the term “mass shootings,” the title of the John Lott book More Guns, Less Crime continues to remain as relevant today as it was back when it was first published.
Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Released Despite FBI Resistance. John Lott explores the long delay in obtaining the diary that might help explain the tragedy at Covenant School.
The debate over concealed carry weapon (CCW) laws is as heated as ever. With out-of-control crime and a flood of illegal alien criminals, citizen concealed carry is needed now more than ever, as recent self-defense events illustrate. Well-funded Gun control advocates tirelessly argue that these laws lead to more crime, but a new research paper “How Does Concealed Carrying of Weapons Affect Violent Crime?” by John R. Lott and Carlisle E. Moody is making waves by challenging these claims head-on. Here’s what you need to know about their findings, especially if you support gun rights.
. . . Several recent articles from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), an organization “dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety,” examine the state of crime and crime reporting and conclude, overall, that factors other than actual crime are giving rise to the illusion of safer streets.
Two of the articles (The Collapse in Law Enforcement: As Arrest Rates Plummet, People Have Been Less Willing to Report Crime and The Media Say Crime Is Going Down. Don’t Believe It: The decline in reported crimes is a function of less reporting, not less crime) evaluate the statistics and the efforts to reinforce Biden’s claim that violent crime is falling dramatically. A third article examines reliability and other problems with the FBI’s reporting of violent crime.
According to the CPRC, one factor contributing to the ostensible dip in violent crime is that almost 40% of local law enforcement agencies are no longer transmitting their information to the national Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database. In “2021, 37% of police departments stopped reporting crime data to the FBI (including large departments for Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York),” and for other jurisdictions, like Baltimore and Nashville, crimes are being underreported or undercounted. This leaves a large gap; by 2021, the real crime data collected by the FBI represented only 63% of police departments overseeing just 65% of the population. When compared to pre-2021 data, the result is a questionable “decline” in crime.
Another factor that undermines the official narrative of less crime is the degree of non-reporting or underreporting of crime by victims. Since 1973, the federal National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) has bypassed police statistics and relied, instead, on interviews with a nationally representative sample of some 240,000 individuals. The information collected includes the frequency and type of crime experienced, including crimes that have not been reported to police.
The CPRC summary of NCVS data states that in 2022 (the most recent survey available), only “42% of violent crimes, such as robberies or aggravated assaults, and 32% of property crimes, such as burglary or arson, were reported [to police]… the [NCVS] shows that total violent crime—reported and nonreported—rose from 16.5 incidents to 23.5 per 1,000 people. Nonreported violent crime in 2022 exceeded the five-year average between 2015 to 2019 by more than 17%.”
To provide a somewhat broader context regarding these trends, the NCVS survey for 2015 stated that “[f]rom 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” and that in 2015, “0.98% of all persons age 12 or older (2.7 million persons) experienced at least one violent victimization.” By 2022, according to the NCVS, the violent crime rate had increased to 23.5 per 1,000, and “about 1.24% (3.5 million) of persons age 12 or older nationwide experienced at least one violent crime.”
Another indicator of crime that the CPRC examined was changes in arrest rates. As arrest rates decline, the number of crimes reported to police falls, because if “people don’t think the police will solve their cases, they are less likely to report them to the police.” The CPRC compared violent crime arrest rates in 2022 with arrests for such offenses over the five years before COVID-19, and found that in 2022, the arrest rate across all cities fell by 20%. Looking at major cities only (those with a population of over one million), the drop in 2022 was an even more precipitous 54%, with only 20.3% of violent crimes in such cities being cleared by arrest. . . .
Staff, “The State of Crime: A Steep Decline, or Another Bidenesque Wild Story?” NRA, May 6, 2024.
