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On the other hand, a 2022 study by Carlisle Moody of the College of William and Mary and Crime Prevention Research Center and John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center found that murder rates in permitless carry states have dropped. . . .
Lott painted the exact opposite picture. “When civilians can go and carry guns defensively, criminals are actually less likely to go and carry guns,” he said in an interview. “When civilians have a gun…they know things can escalate at that point, and so they go and try to commit crimes more frequently in other ways.”
Lott also said that while economists and criminologists tend to be more skeptical that gun control reduces crimes, public-health officials usually believe in the benefits of passing gun regulations.
And despite the Dickey Amendment, Lott said public-health officials get millions in funding from the federal government because they say their research isn’t used to promote gun control. He said that pro-gun control academics also get a lot of support from anti-gun groups.
One significant indication that warnings about the dire consequences of loosening gun laws aren’t coming true, Lott said, is that states that have passed permitless carry laws have made no attempt to repeal them.
“If their constituents – whether it be police, whether it be others – say, ‘Look, we’re having real problems with this,’ don’t you think there would be at least somebody who you wouldn’t have to convince very hard to put up bills to undo it,” Lott said. . . .
Jeremy Pelzer, “Will Ohio’s permitless-carry gun law make the state more or less safe? Here’s what the data says (and what it doesn’t),” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 26, 2022. Jeremy Pelzer, “Will Ohio’s permitless-carry gun law make the state more or less safe? Here’s what the data says (and what it doesn’t),” The Lima News, March 26, 2022.
In Kentucky, the number of people with concealed carry licenses has dipped after the state passed a permitless carry law–from 410,000 in 2019 to 396,919 in 2021, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, a gun rights advocacy group.
In West Virginia, the number of permits has fluctuated from 147,801 in 2015, to 133,991 in 2019 and 147,327 in 2020. . . .
While guns used in crimes grab the headlines, people in the United State have a long history of relying upon firearms for self-defense. However, the reports go largely unnoticed since the masses are unaware of how often weapons are used for protection.
“Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when people are facing a criminal by themselves,” Dr. John Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital. In particular, he pointed to women who “behave passively” and are “about 2.4 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who has a gun to protect herself.” . . .
According to Lott, the media reports about 2,000 defensive gun use stories in a typical year.
However, he said “that is a dramatic undercount, because the vast majority of successful self-defense cases don’t make the news.”
Lott made a bold assertion that is rarely discussed. The number of people using firearms as self-defense is much higher than most people can imagine.
There are about 2 million defensive gun uses per year, according to the average of 18 national surveys. . . .
According to Lott, “Ninety-five percent of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing a gun, and less than 1% involve the attacker being killed or wounded. But most news stories only report on cases where attackers are killed and brandishings are ignored. It is understandable that someone getting killed is more newsworthy than a woman brandishing a gun and the criminal running away without committing a crime, but from a policy perspective we care about both cases.” . . .
Concealed carry permits have increased along with violent crime statistics. The number of concealed handgun permits surged to 21.52 million in 2020, a 48% increase since 2016 and a 10.5% increase from the same time last year, according to a study conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center released in October.
According to a statement from Lott last year, “women made up 28.3% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender.” However, the astonishing demographic was found among black Americans. They grew 135.7% faster as permit holders than their white counterparts.
“The people who benefit the most from owning guns are also the ones who are the most likely victims of violent crime — poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas,” according to Lott. . . .
To Lott, what most people miss amid the emphasis on gun crimes is that “over 92% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns.”
“The data shows that while violent crime reported to police rose 5% between 2019 and 2020, you can’t blame that increase on guns because gun crimes actually fell by 27%,” he said.
“The bottom line is that if you want to reduce gun crime, you do the same things that you do to reduce violent crime generally, and that is make it riskier for criminals to commit crime.”
For those who do not know how other democracies treat voting laws, here are the facts. Forty-six of 47 European countries require government-issued photo ID to vote. The United Kingdom is the exception, but the British Parliament is considering a nationwide voter ID requirement, which will make photo ID a universal requirement for voting in Europe.
Canada requires photo ID to vote. Mexico requires an ID with a hologram and thumbprint to vote. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, points out that since adoption of voter reforms in Mexico, voter participation increased from 59% to 68% because citizens were “more … likely to vote when they had confidence that their votes mattered.”
As for mail-in voting, 35 of 47 European countries do not allow absentee voting for citizens living in-country. Another 10, including England, allow absentee voting but require voters to show up in person and present photo ID to pick up their ballots. Canada allows absentee balloting for any reason, including being away on Election Day, which is the same as the U.S.
No country allows universal mail-in balloting other than the U.S. Most of those countries have learned that mail-in voting provides too many opportunities for fraud, from fake signatures to signature verification issues to ballot harvesting.
Bob Jacobs, “U.S. must follow lead of other countries in protecting our votes,” Pittsburgh Tribune, February 28, 2022.
With DeSantis expressing support, Sabatini wrote in a recent op-ed published with John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, in the Orlando Sentinel that the bill’s “chances of adoption have greatly improved.”
Anybody who can legally own a gun “should be able to carry a firearm at any given time,” Sabatini told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I think it’s important to have a law on the books to allow people to defend themselves without government permission.” . . .
Were the state to introduce such a law, it might actually cost more lives than it saves, said John Lott on RealClearPolitics.com. Mass shootings by under-18s are still rare in the US: there have been four since 2000, causing 29 deaths. As for accidental gun deaths among under-18s, Michigan averaged under two a year in the last decade.
This is “a fraction” of the lives lost as a result of gun-storage laws that prevent people defending themselves from intruders: in states with such laws, murder rates are much higher, and burglaries “dramatically” so. (To gauge the effect of deterrence, consider the fact that the UK has twice the burglary rate of the US, where criminals are worried about getting shot.) Mandating gun locks sounds good, but it could have “unintended consequences.”
CNN took note of the accelerating move toward constitutional carry, noting that similar legislation is now pending in Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Nebraska. Michigan and Louisiana are also lining up behind the move toward permitless carry. CNN complained that such a law somehow “protects criminals,” claiming further that such freedom will lead to a rise in violent gun-related crime.
Not so, wrote John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. In fact, those carrying firearms are much less likely to be convicted of a gun-related crime than even police — 12 times less likely, in fact:
Permit holders nationwide are incredibly law-abiding. Police officers are extremely rarely convicted of firearms-related violations, but it still happens, at a rate twelve times more often than for permit holders.
The case for constitutional carry is persuasive:
The people who benefit the most are those who live in high-crime urban areas;
None of the states which have passed constitutional carry laws have reconsidered them, or even held a single hearing questioning the decision;
The citizens resisting tyranny in Ukraine provide unassailable evidence of the efficacy of the private ownership of firearms; and
Where firearms are prevalent violent crime predictably and consistently declines.
As John Lott has noted many times since the 1998 publication of his landmark book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” people with aggressive violent attenuate their behavior based on the probabilistic expectation of armed resistance. In 2018, Lott noted the dark flipside of this phenomenon, seen in so-called “Gun-Free Zones.”
According to a 2014 study by the Crime Prevention Research Center study 96% of mass shootings in America took place between 1998 and 2015 in “gun-free” zones. While gun control advocates have disputed those statistics, you can practically confirm their essential validity of the finding by recalling that many of the more horrific instances of homicidal mania occurred in schools, churches, workplaces and nightclubs where the victims were almost sure to be unarmed.
By contrast, there are no recent examples of mass murder in shooting ranges, where everyone present has a gun.
Gun control is not the solution, as the rate of mass shootings has increased over the last 30 years, at a time when multiple gun control laws have been implemented. Taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens has not and will not stop the problem. . . .
In early January, state Sen. Tom Brewer, R-Gordon, introduced a permitless carry measure, Legislative Bill 773. The proposal had a lengthy public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Jan. 20 that included testimony by Dr. John Lott, a well-known criminologist in 2A circles. Lott addressed the fact that permit costs in the Cornhusker State are among the highest in the nation.
“Right now, it’s $100 for a permit in Nebraska that’s twice the national average for cost for permits,” said Lott. “Plus, if you include the training cost, you’re talking about something that’s at least $170 or so. That may not stop you or I from being able to go in and have a permit. But the very people that my research indicates who benefit the most from being able to go and have a gun for protection, poor minorities who live in high crime urban areas. One hundred and seventy dollars might make the difference between whether or not they can legally carry or not.”
Chris Eger, “PERMITLESS CARRY ON THE MOVE IN SEVERAL STATES,” Guns.com, February 2, 2022.
President Joe Biden is a gun control advocate. We all know this. We’ve heard his rhetoric. Much like others in that space, he likes to talk about “reasonable” measures to curtail so-called gun violence.
However, like Rep. Thomas Massie and Dr. John Lott note in a new op-ed, there’s nothing reasonable about the president when it comes to the Second Amendment.
Tom Knighton, “Biden’s rhetoric on guns anything but reasonable,” Bearings Arms, February 14, 2022.
As we’ve reported, over 21 million Americans now carry concealed, according to data from the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Garrett O’Leary, “What’s Next for Constitutional Carry?” America’s 1st Freedom, March 16, 2022.
