LOTT: ROUNDING UP THE GUNS, WHAT NOT TO DO

NATIONAL REVIEW

January 13, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Rounding Up the Guns
What not to do
The go-to expert on foolish rushes to further
restrict guns after a shooting is John R. Lott Jr.
An economist is author of the authoritative
More Guns, Less Crime, now in its third edition.
National Review Online talked to him about the Tucson attack.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Are you outraged that Jared
Lee Loughner was not marked a “prohibited possessor”
when he went to Sportman’s Warehouse to buy a
gun on November 30?
John R. Lott Jr.: No. I am not. While about 90 percent
of murderers have a violent criminal history,
not every murderer does. It is impossible to flag
everyone who might possibly become a criminal.
While Loughner had an arrest record and exhibited
strange behavior, he was not a convicted criminal,
and had not been involuntarily committed, and
had not been deemed as a risk to others.
Do people really want to forbid gun ownership to
law-abiding individuals who have never been
convicted of a crime?

Background checks are actually very ineffective
to begin with and are mostly an inconvenience for
regular people. Unfortunately, many law-abiding
citizens end up being erroneously flagged. People
intent on horrific crimes are not going to be
deterred if they cannot get the guns legally.

They can easily enough get guns illegally.

The statistics are clear on this issue:
Virtually the only people inconvenienced by
background checks are law-abiding citizens.
Just as law-abiding citizens accidentally get their
names on the government’s “no-fly” list,
Americans without a criminal record also find
themselves prevented from buying guns.

In 2008, 1.5 percent of those having a Brady
background check were forbidden from
purchasing a gun. Unfortunately, virtually all
these cases represent so-called “false positives.”
In 2006 and 2007 (the latest years with detailed data),
a tiny fraction — just 2 percent — of those denials
involved possible unlawful possession; and just
0.2 percent of the denials were viewed as
prosecutable — 174 cases in 2006 and 122 in 2007.

Even when the government decided that the cases
were prosecutable, at least a third of them failed
to result in convictions and even the few convictions
were often for people who simply made mistakes — they
hadn’t realized that they were prohibited from purchasing a gun.

The Brady background checks have done virtually
nothing to prevent people with criminal intent
from getting guns. Given that, it isn’t too surprising
that no academic studies by economists or criminologists
have found that the Brady Act or other state
background checks have reduced violent crime.

Lopez: Does anyone need a nine-millimeter Glock,
the gun he used?
Lott: Nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols are by far
the most common handguns sold in the U.S.
Handguns are particularly useful for self-defense
in enclosed spaces such as inside a house.

Indeed, there is a safety reason for using handguns.
The bullets fired by handguns travel more slowly
than those fired by rifles and are thus less likely
to harm people outside of the home.

As to the type of handgun that works best for
people — that depends on everything from the size
of the person’s hands and strength to how much
stopping power he needs.

Lopez: Isn’t that gun made “to kill people,” as I’ve heard on MSNBC?
Lott: Well, guns do make it easier to kill people,
but guns also make it easier for people to defend themselves.
The defensive argument is especially important
for people who are weaker physically — women
and the elderly — and for those living in crime-infested
neighborhoods, such as poor blacks in urban areas.
Criminals are overwhelmingly young males who
are physically stronger than their potential victims.
Police are extremely important in deterring crime,
but they understand that they almost always
arrive on the scene after the crime has been committed.

Simply telling people to behave passively or to
defend themselves in some other way is not very good advice.
Having a gun is by far the safest course of action for those
left to confront a criminal alone.
Lopez: Should we ban guns at civic events,
to protect congressmen?
Lott: Another law banning guns from outdoor
events would be ineffective — it would make
no difference for somebody intent on committing murder.
Actually enforcing such a law would require
conducting events only in enclosed areas with guards
checking for guns at the entrance. It would
effectively ban the type of spontaneous contact
that Congresswoman Giffords and others felt was
so important. It isn’t very clear how one would
provide extensive Secret Service protection to all
535 members of Congress.

Lopez: Could this attack have been prevented if
there were a federal assault-weapons ban?
Lott: When the federal assault-weapons ban expired
on Sept. 14, 2004, those favoring the ban predicted
a massive violent-crime wave.

Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the Democratic
party’s presidential nominee that year, warned it
would make “the job of terrorists easier.”
California senator Dianne Feinstein foresaw that
deadly crime would soar because of the “pent-up
demand for 50-round magazines and larger.”
Gun-control advocates such as Sarah Brady,
James’s wife, anticipated similar problems.

Six years have passed since the ban expired,
and none of those fears has been borne out.
Indeed, every category of violent crime has fallen,
with the murder rate falling by about
15 percent between 2004 and June 2010.

The recently released third edition of More Guns,
Less Crime found that the six states that have
their own assault-weapons ban saw a smaller drop
in murders than the 44 states without such laws.

There is no academic research by criminologists or
economists that shows that either state or federal
assault-weapon bans have reduced any type of
violent crime. Clips are very easy to cheaply make,
and a ban would mean that criminals, not law-abiding
individuals, would have the advantagein any confrontation.

The civilian version of the AK-47, or other so-called
“assault weapons,” may look like the guns used
by militaries around the world, but they are quite different.
The civilian version of the AK-47 is not a machine gun,
and fires essentially the same bullets as
deer-hunting rifles at the same rapidity (one bullet
per pull of the trigger), and does the same damage.

Of course, in this attack in Tucson, the weapon used
was a very commonly owned handgun.
Lopez: What about some kind of ban on high-capacity magazines?
Could that have cut down on the casualties?
Lott: Re-instituting the parts of the assault-
weapon ban limiting magazine size won’t lower crime.
No research by criminologists or economist found
that the ban or magazine-size restrictions reduced crime.
Magazines are just small metal boxes with a spring,
and are very easy to make.
The benefits of not exchanging the magazines accrue
to law-abiding citizens, police, and criminals.
If criminals still get the larger magazines,
they’ll have the advantage.

Lopez: Is there anything new about the legislation
Carolyn McCarthy is offering?
Lott: No, she is trying to re-institute part
of the federal assault-weapons ban.
Lopez: Why shouldn’t members of Congress be emotionally
or politically pressured into supporting it?
Lott: Too often, knee-jerk reactions cause Congress
to pass laws that actually make future crimes more likely.
Creating gun-free zones is one such example.
Banning guns from places such as schools might
have seemed like a way of protecting children or
college students, but instead it created a magnet
for those intent on causing harm. The problem is
that instead of gun-free zones making it safe for
potential victims, they make it safe for criminals.
Criminals are less likely to run into those who
might be able to stop them. Everyone wants to
keep guns away from criminals, but the question is,
who is more likely to obey the law?

A student expelled for violating a gun-free zone
at a college is extremely unlikely ever to be
accepted to another college. A faculty member
fired for a firearms violation will find it virtually
impossible to get another academic position, but
even if the killer at Virginia Tech had lived, the
notion that the threat of expulsion would have
deterred the attacker when he would have
already faced 32 death penalties or at least 32 life
sentences seems silly.

Letting civilians have licensed concealed handguns
limits the damage from attacks. A major factor in
determining how many people are harmed by
these killers is the amount of time that elapses
between when the attack starts and when someone
with a gun is able to arrive on the scene.

I really wish that I could point to something that
seems to work here. If background checks make
people feel safer, I suppose that there are worse
wastes of money, but, generally, gun-control laws
either have no effect on crime or actually make
things worse. It seems preferable to take the
money that we are spending on gun-control laws
and use it to hire more police, whom we do know
to be extremely important in stopping crime.
The big question that people have to ask when
examining a law is, who is most likely to obey it?
If the law-abiding, good citizens are the ones most
likely disarmed by the law, the law can actually
make crime rates worse.

Lopez: But don’t gun bans stop criminals from getting guns?
Lott: Everyone wants to keep guns away from
criminals, but the question is: Who is most likely
to obey the law? With a ban, if the law-abiding
citizens are the ones who turn in their guns
relative to the criminals, you can actually see
increases in crime rates, and that is what we see happening.
In every instance, we have data that show that
when a ban is imposed, murder rates rise.

In America, people are all too familiar with the
increased murder rates in Chicago and Washington,
D.C., following their handgun bans. They might
even be familiar with the 36 percent drop in
murder rates in D.C. since the Supreme Court
struck down its handgun ban and gun-lock laws.

Supporters blame those gun-control failures on
the ease of getting guns in the rest of the country.
The claim is that unless the ban covers the entire
country, it isn’t a fair test of how well a ban will work.
Still, that doesn’t explain why gun bans increase murder rates.
As the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows,
even in island nations such as Ireland, the U.K.,
and Jamaica — with their easily defendable borders
and lack of obvious neighbors — gun bans haven’t
stopped drug gangs from getting either drugs
or the guns that they use
to protect their valuable product (see the figures here).

Lopez: What have been the most prevalent media
errors you’ve heard in recent days?
Lott: No one in the media holds gun-control advocates responsible for past claims.

Again, after the federal assault-weapons ban expired,
politicians and gun-control advocates lined up
claiming that murder and violence rates would soar,
but the opposite happened.
So when gun-control advocates now claim that
renewing part of the assault-weapons ban is
essential to control violent crime, it would be
helpful for reporters to once in a while call them
on their past predictions.

It is also disappointing how quickly the press
jumps to conclusions about motives of the criminals.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote
that if you were “wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat,
the kind Republicans might be able to work with,
might be a target, the answer is that she’s a
Democrat who survived what was otherwise a
GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the
Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. . . .
‘The whole Tea Party’ was her enemy and, yes,
she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list.”
He even attacked Palin’s offer of concern and
prayers for the victims as insufficient.

On CNN, correspondent Jessica Yellin singled out
Sarah Palin as bearing responsibility for the
attack: “political rhetoric, as you point out,
in creating the environment that allowed this
instance to happen . . . President Obama also
delivered that message saying that it was partly
the political rhetoric that led to this.”

Well, it looks like those who blamed Sarah Palin
and the Tea Party for political gain are going to
wish that they had waited just a couple of days.
Jared Loughner has been described by a former
classmate as “left wing, quite liberal,” and
a “pothead,” — hardly a Tea Party fan — who
has had a fixation on Giffords since 2007, well
before Sarah Palin or the Tea Party made their
entry onto the national political scene

Lopez: Where should Congress go from here?
Lott: Sen. John Thune’s proposal for right-to-carry reciprocity,
to make concealed-carry licenses more like driver’s licenses,
would be helpful.

Congress should also try undoing many new regulations
and treaties that the Obama administration is
pushing through. The Obama administration has
enacted a ban on the importation of semiautomatic
guns because: “The U.S. insisted that imports of
the aging rifles could cause problems such as
firearm accidents.” They have also imposed much
more extensive reporting requirements on sales of
long guns. However, possibly the biggest threat is
Obama’s nomination of Andrew Traver to head the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
There is also the Obama administration’s push for
the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty and its continual
inaccurate statements about the source of Mexico’s
crime guns.

Lopez: Do Jason Chaffetz and Heath Shuler — two congressmen
who are planning on arming themselves when they are in
their districts — have the right idea? Is that necessary?
Lott: Congressmen can be victims of violent crime,
and not just because of their prominent
political position. In 1997, when Colorado senator
Ben Nighthorse Campbell was asked by the Denver
Post “how it looks for a senator to be packing heat,”
he responded, “You’d be surprised how many
senators have guns.” Campbell said that “he needed
the gun back in the days when he exhibited his
Native American jewelry and traveled long distances
between craft shows.” I just wish that more people
in Tucson, Arizona, were carrying concealed
handguns with them when the attack occurred on Saturday.