Newest piece at National Review Online: Children and Guns: The Fear and the Reality

My newest piece at National Review starts this way:

Should you ask your neighbors if they own a gun before your child plays at their house? And what do you do if they say yes?After the tragic accidental death this month of a two-year-old Kentucky girl who had been shot by her five-year-old brother, the answer may seem obvious: Do not let your child play at a gun owner’s home, at least if you are not sure he is locking up his guns. . . .

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My interview at National Review on my new book "At the Brink" is available here

My interview at National Review starts this way:

After the defeat of the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill, and the subsequent demonization of the Senate, Senators Manchin and Toomey are reportedly back at work on bipartisan legislation addressing gun control. John R. Lott, author of the new book At the Brink, who has been researching gun policy for decades, talks about the state of the debate with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. 

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Gabby Giffords has accused the Senate of being in the grips of the gun lobby. Is there another explanation for the defeat of the Manchin-Toomey bill? 

JOHN R. LOTT: Yes, there is. The politicians were simply representing the voters in their districts. 

The accusation that politicians were attempting to please the gun lobby at the expense of their constituents, which is based on the oft-repeated assertion that 80 to 90 percent of the public say they favor background checks, is simply not credible. The survey questions on which this statistic is based proved nothing more than that respondents wished to disarm criminals. The questions posed were about a hypothetical, idealized system of background checks, not about the actual legislation facing Congress. . . .

 The rest of the interview is available here.

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Newest Fox News piece: "Who is really lying in the gun debate?"

I would have titled this differently, something like: What Obama could have done if he really wanted to pass the gun control law.  My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

After failing to get his gun control bill passed by the Senate Wednesday, President Obama lashed out at his usual favorite targets, "the gun lobby" and Republicans.  

He claimed "the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill." He scolded "senators [who] could not offer any good reason" to oppose the legislation. And sharing the stage with some of the heartbroken families from Newtown, Connecticut, he attacked Republicans as being unwilling to "protect the lives of all our children." 

But who is really lying in the gun debate? Mr. Obama's case in favor of background checks rests on two false claims that he keeps repeating: “as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases take place without a background check” and that "background checks have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from buying a gun.” . . .

In contrast to what I argue in my piece, Democrats are claiming that they tried everything.  Possibly everything politically, but not everything in terms of actual policy.  From Politico:

David Axelrod, sounding shell-shocked by the decisiveness of the Senate defeat on gun reform, said Obama is indeed frustrated by the constraints that bind him and knows that’s what he signed up for. “On this one, he tried everything,” Axelrod said. “It’s easy after a stinging defeat like this to say: ‘There’s no formula.’ But what you can’t do is take your bat and ball and go home.” . . . 

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New Philadelphia Inquirer piece: "The problems of gun checks"

My new piece from yesterday started this way:

Everyone wants to keep criminals from getting guns. However, expanded background checks are not the simple answer that Sens. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) think they are. 

Unfortunately, as the Senate considers the Manchin-Toomey amendment, Toomey is simply wrong to assert: "It's the people who fail a criminal or mental-health background check who we don't want having guns." 

Toomey apparently does not understand how the background-check system works. Take his claim on Sunday: "Since checks began in 1998, more than 100,000 people who are ineligible to own guns have been denied them each year." Just because someone is "initially denied" permission to buy a gun doesn't mean that he is really ineligible to own guns. . . .

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My newest op-ed at Fox News: Fact vs. fiction on background checks and the gun control debate

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Will Senate Democrats be able to end debate on their new gun control bill Tuesday night? President Obama says that it is “not right” to continue the debate. But he might be more afraid that Senators will point out all of his false claims and reveal the gun control bill’s dangers. 

Mr. Obama got it all backwards in his April 3rd speech in Colorado: "tougher background checks . . . won’t infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners, but will help keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people."  

The president kept claiming this week and last week that: “as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases take place without a background check”  and that "background checks have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from buying a gun.”  But both statistics are false. . . .

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Newest Fox News piece: "Buyers, beware: UN Arms Trade Treaty will regulate individual gun ownership"

This is the way my newest piece starts:

The U.N.'s Arms Trade Treaty, which seemed dead last July, is beginning to wrap up negotiations.  The Obama administration is committed to getting it passed . Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed: “The United States is steadfast in its commitment to achieve a strong and effective Arms Trade Treaty." 

The treaty was resurrected on Nov. 8 – the very day after President Obama’s re-election. Very conveniently, that the Obama administration delayed the U.N. vote in favor of renewing negotiations delayed until the president was no longer constrained by public opinion. 

The Arms Trade Treaty will regulate individual gun ownership all across the world. Each country will be obligated to “maintain a national control list that shall include [rifles and handguns]” and "to regulate brokering taking place under its jurisdiction for conventional arms.”  In fact, the new background check rules approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee include just those rules -- a registration system and a record of all transfers of guns. . . .

The Arms Trade Treaty is available here.

Article 2, 2: Each State Party shall "shall establish or update, as appropriate, and maintain a national control list that shall include the items that fall within paragraph 1"  included "Small arms and light weapons"

Article 6, 4: "establish and maintain a national control system to regulate the export of ammunition for conventional arms under the scope of this treaty."

Article 6, 5: "parts and components"

Article 8: "to regulate brokering taking place under its jurisdiction for conventional arms"

Article 10: records of "quantity, value, model/type, authorized international transfers of conventional arms . . . end users, as appropriate.  Records shall be kept for a minimum of ten years, or longer . . . ."

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Newest piece at IBD: "Media Play Up Faulty Study Suggeting Link Between Guns, Death Rates"

My newest piece at Investors' Business Daily starts this way:

Do fewer guns mean fewer firearm deaths? If you believe the March 6th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association of Internal Medicine, the answer is "yes."

A study by Eric Fleegler and four other co-authors received massive national news coverage from USA Today to the television networks.

But the report is based on embarrassingly bad statistics that are rigged to get the result the authors wanted.

Take how they measure gun ownership. Believe it or not, this study measures gun ownership by looking at the share of suicides committed using firearms.

Then the authors go on to commit an egregious and basic statistical error. They claim that states with higher gun ownership have higher gun death rates. But wait a second — most gun deaths are gun suicides. And what they call "gun ownership" in their study is also measured by gun suicides.

In other words, all the study proves is that more gun suicides leads to, well — more gun suicides. Any serious statistical journal would not have published such nonsense.
The Fleegler study also involves a geographic comparison across the 50 U.S. states . . . .

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Newest piece up at Fox News: Can poor people be trusted with guns?

This is based on some of the discussion in my new book "At the Brink."  My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Can poor people be trusted with guns? Overwhelmingly, Republicans thinks so. But while Democrats fight against taxes on the poor and oppose voter photo IDs because they impose too much of burden, they seem to be doing everything possible – from fees, expensive training requirements, and photo IDs -- to make it next to impossible for the poor to own guns. 

Indeed, legislation in at least 17 states around the country is aimed specifically at making it more costly to own a gun. Democrats are voting in mass against exempting the poor from fees when it comes to guns. New Yorkers aren't alone facing everything from registration fees to buying liability insurance. 

That's too bad, because many law-abiding citizens, particularly minorities in crime-ridden neighborhoods really do need a gun for self-defense. There is little doubt that the people who are most likely to be victims of violent crime – again, overwhelmingly poor blacks in urban areas -- are also the ones who benefit the most from owning guns.  Research, including my own, has demonstrated this. . . .

Even after a few days, this piece was the most read piece in the op-ed section.

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Piece at Fox News: "The truth about assault weapons bans and background checks"

This piece starts this way:

With the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting this week, it's likely that new gun control bills will be drafted very quickly. There are in essence two parts to the bills: the part that deals with the  “assault weapon ban” and the part that deals with “universal background checks.” The first one faces long odds of passage, but the second might well pass. 

Democrats will undoubtedly push for an assault weapons ban. The ban has become a central tenant of the Democratic party, with Obama's calls "to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets" and even Michelle Obama claiming crimes are being committed with “automatic weapons.” Senator Dianne Feinstein is pushing hard to reinstitute the earlier assault weapon ban, which she had originally enacted in 1994. 

Proponents of an "Assault Weapons Ban" often argue their point by posing the question: "Why do people need a semiautomatic Bushmaster to go out and kill deer?" . . .

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New Fox News piece: "February's jobs report only looks good because our expectations are so low"

My newest piece starts this way:

The new unemployment numbers released Friday look reasonable only because our expectations have are so low. 

In February, the 236,000 new jobs added beat out the 166,000 increase in the working age population, but the labor force participation rate remains stuck at a level that is so low Americans haven't seen anything like it for decades. It simply isn't making a dent in the huge number of people who have simply given up looking for work.  

Even this last month didn't really help. The number of unemployed Americans fell by about 300,000, but 99 percent of that drop can be  explained by an increase in the number of people who are no longer in the labor force. 

Millions of people have simply given up looking for work. 

And they have good reason to be discouraged. Job growth has only grown by an anemic 2.5 percent during this recovery. That’s compared to 9.2 percent during the average recovery since 1970 and 12 percent after severe recessions. . . .

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New piece in Investors' Business Daily: "Obama's Sequester Cuts Are A Mere 1% Of Budget"

My new piece starts this way:

President Obama is almost breathless predicting "devastating" consequences if the sequester trigger is pulled. 

He warns the cuts "will hurt our economy ... add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls. ... The unemployment rate might tick up again." 

But will a $44 billion cut in spending out of a $3.8 trillion budget, a mere 1%, really be a "meat cleaver approach" that will "eviscerate" government programs? 

Obama frightens people by pretending that the $1 trillion cut takes place right away rather than being spread out over 10 years. 

He has taken almost every possible position on spending and taxes. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama continually promised to "cut net spending" and make government smaller. The stimulus was promised not to "raise projected deficits beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two." . . . .

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New piece at National Review: "Ted Cruz Sets the Record Straight on Guns"

My new piece at National Review starts this way:

Newly elected senator Ted Cruz has jumped right into the fray. So far he is the only senator who has dared challenge the many blatant falsehoods President Obama and many congressional Democrats have been pushing regarding guns, in particular the bogus claim that 40 percent of gun sales are done without background checks. 

Unsurprisingly, his willingness to speak out has recently made Cruz a target of the media. While he has come in for a range of attacks from the New York Times, recently Politifact has focused on his statement: “the jurisdictions with the strictest gun-control laws, almost without exception . . . have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.” In the last case, they labeled his statement “false.” 

Is the “false” rating deserved? In Politifact’s explanation, it becomes more than a little bit obvious that their verdict is seriously strained, not least because they do acknowledge that context clarifies Cruz’s point. When using the term “strictest gun-control laws,” the senator was referring to gun bans (either a ban on handguns or all guns), and he was referring to so-called panel data as the evidence. 

This makes a considerable difference  . . . .

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New Fox News piece: Will Obama push us over the edge?

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Obama thinks he has a mandate for change. But this is the man who ran for president in 2008 promising to “cut net spending” and to shrink the federal government; a man who promised that his “stimulus” spending was only temporary. 

Obama hid regulations from view until after his reelection. The press maintained the fiction that Obama supports the Second Amendment and is no threat to citizens’ keeping guns for self-defense. Yet the day after his reelection, Obama called for the UN Arms Trade Treaty negotiations to be started again, and a few weeks later he promised to put the full force of the federal government behind a push for massive new gun control. 

Even on taxes, Obama’s post-election demands contradicted the positions on which he campaigned. Sure he promised higher taxes on “the rich.” But during the campaign he said that he wanted $800 billion from them. As soon as Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, agreed to raise that amount by eliminating various credits and deductions for high-income taxpayers, Obama announced that he really wanted twice that amount. . . . 

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Newest piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Misleading claims about what new proposals will do"

My newest piece starts this way:

President Obama's continued call on Friday for "commonsense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun" is something that everyone agrees with. Unfortunately, the president is misleadingly claiming what his proposals would do, and they are more likely to do more harm than good. 

Consider "background checks." According to Obama and gun-control advocates, "40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check." That is just false. Only if you were to classify family inheritances and gifts as "purchases" would you get a number anywhere near that high. . . .

A version of this piece has appeared in the Tampa Bay Times, Omaha World Herald, Youngstown Vindicator, the Gulf Today, and the Columbus Post-Dispatch.

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Newest piece in the New York Post: "The truth on background checks"

My piece starts this way:

Gun control “deserves a vote,” President Obama said time and again in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. Sadly, the measure Congress is most likely to pass — beefed-up background checks — may cause more harm than good. 

First, checks obviously won’t do anything about gun crime in cities like Chicago or New York, which revolves almost exclusively around illegal guns. 

But they also wouldn’t stop the mass killings Obama mentioned. The Newtown, Conn., shooter stole his mother’s guns, while the Tucson, Ariz., and other killers didn’t have records that a check would’ve spotted. 

You can see the fundamental unseriousness of this proposal just by looking at the numbers cited by its advocates, such as New York’s own Sen. Chuck Schumer. 

Schumer tells us that “48 percent of gun sales are made without a background check” and that background checks have “blocked 1.7 million prohibited individuals from buying a gun.” Both stats are just false. . . .

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Daily Caller piece: "Obama’s spending failure"

My piece starts this way:

According to President Obama, cutting government spending will “certainly slow our recovery.” Over and over again, he has described the sequester’s threatened $85 billion cut in spending out of a $3.8 trillion budget as “devastating.” But that represents a mere 2 percent cut in spending. Obama frightens people by pretending that the $1 trillion cut takes place right away rather than being spread out over 10 years. 

Sounds like more of the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama continually promised to “cut net spending” and make government smaller. The stimulus was promised not to “raise projected deficits beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.” Yet, now during the fifth year of Obama’s presidency, we are told that we can’t cut spending, that we need even more government “investments.” . . .

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Piece at Human Events: "OBAMA’S PROPOSALS WON’T REDUCE GUN VIOLENCE"

The piece starts this way:

Warning that we need to “get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets,” in his State of the Union, Obama kept repeating congress must vote on the three types of gun bills he supports. 

The most obvious thing that was left out of the talk was that none of the laws now being proposed would have done anything to stop the various attacks that Obama cited as justifying the laws.  Nor does the evidence show that the previous Assault Weapon Ban from 1994 to 2004 reduced crime. 

Were some of the killers mentally ill?  Undoubtedly, “yes,” but none of these individuals had previously been involuntarily committed as a threat to themselves or to others. 

Connecticut already had a strict assault weapon ban.  But there is no proposed federal or state ban that would have mattered.  . . . .

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New Piece at National Review Online: "The ‘40 Percent’ Myth: The figure gun-control advocates are throwing around is false."

My new piece starts this way:

Gun-control advocates have recently been throwing around an impressive new number. President Obama used it last Wednesday, claiming: “as many as 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check.” Vice President Biden and everyone from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to USA Today repeatedly use it. That “fact” provided the principal support for his first announced gun-control proposal, “universal background checks.” But unless you include family inheritances and gifts as “purchases,” it is simply false. 

The Brady Act background checks currently prevent someone who buys from a federally licensed dealer from buying a gun if he has a felony, or in many cases a misdemeanor conviction, or has been involuntarily committed for mental illness. Prior to Brady, federal law merely required that people sign a statement stating that they did not have a criminal record or a history of mental problems under threat of perjury. Obama’s 40 percent claim makes it look like a lot of gun buyers are avoiding these checks. . . .

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Newest piece at US News: "Obama's Gun Proposals Ignore the Facts"

My piece begins this way:

President Obama believes that people who oppose his gun control regulations do so "because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves." That they will do "everything they can to block any commonsense reform" that is necessary "to protect our communities and our kids." 

Sorry, but we all are motivated by the same concern to save lives. I may believe that Obama's views are wrong-headed and that they will endanger public safety, but that is quite different from accusing him of allowing children to die because he will benefit from those deaths. 

Two things stand out as particularly disappointing in Obama's offering of new gun control regulations: 1) his willing to make so many false claims and 2) his inability to acknowledge that gun control regulations have real costs. Take his first couple "facts" during his presentation. . . .

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Newest piece in the WSJ: "The Facts About Assault Weapons and Crime"

Correction noted here.

My piece starts this way:

Warning about "weapons designed for the theater of war," President Obama on Wednesday called for immediate action on a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He said that "more of our fellow Americans might still be alive" if the original assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, had not expired in 2004. Last month, in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) promised to introduce an updated version of the ban. She too warned of the threat posed by "military weapons." 

After the nightmare of Newtown, their concern is understandable. Yet despite being at the center of the gun-control debate for decades, neither President Obama nor Ms. Feinstein (the author of the 1994 legislation) seems to understand the leading research on the effects of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In addition, they continue to mislabel the weapons they seek to ban. . . .

Copies of the studies discussed are here and here.  Feinstein's website is here.

On the most read list:

The WSJ published two letters on my op-ed.

Many thanks to John R. Lott Jr. ("The Facts About Assault Weapons and Crime," op-ed, Jan. 18). The arbitrary designation of "assault weapon" masks true capabilities and limitations among disparate weapons. As a former Marine, I learned the hard way which guns were most dangerous while battling the Taliban in Afghanistan. Insurgents with assault weapons such as AK-47s were easily dealt with, while the most dangerous rifle encountered was the British-made Lee-Enfield caliber .303 that could fire accurately from more than six-hundred meters away. They were traditional, wood-stocked, hunting-style rifles, bolt action, and many over a hundred years old.
Daniel Barbeau
Irvine, Calif.
 
Another day, another opinion article bemoaning the likely ineffectiveness of proposed gun legislation. John Lott bases his argument on the fact that the previous Federal Assault Weapons Ban barely affected the murder rate. Of course it didn't, for two reasons. Most murders are committed using handguns, and it wasn't a ban on the weapons, it simply banned the sale of new ones. The Australians understood this, which is why, after their own horrific mass killing, they not only banned the sale of these weapons, they also banned ownership, and financed a buyback program. And the result—no new mass killings in 17 years—has been what they hoped for.
Most of your contributors decry the proposed legislation without proposing an alternative. To his credit, Mr. Lott has an alternative, and it is chilling: citizens armed with semiautomatic weapons literally everywhere. I have been to countries where there are armed guards at every building, and I have been to ones where even the police don't normally carry weapons. I know where I feel safer.
Martin Herrington
Cincinnati

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