Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched "studies" have twisted the facts on gun control

by John R. Lott Jr., Andrew Pollack (Foreword)

Lott blows away one false myth about gun ownership after another. As Andrew Pollack's Foreward notes; "Learn the actual facts that debunk them.” From myths about mass public shootings to suicides to gun ownership rates and crime to gun free zones, Lott addresses the claims you frequently hear in the media and explains what is wrong with those claims.

Genres: Politics

187 pages, Paperback

Published July 3, 2020

About the author

John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American economist and political commentator. Lott was formerly employed at various academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and at the American Enterprise Institute conservative think tank. He is currently a Fox News opinion contributor. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

Reviews

[Signe · Rating 5 out of 5]

tl;dr

The USA most definitely does not have the highest per capita rates of gun violence.

The leading cause of childhood mortality is not gun violence.

This book is a serious analysis of firearms use and employs econometrics analysis.


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John R Lott Jr, has a Ph.d in Economics and has taught at various universities like University of Chicago, Yale, Stanford, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Rice University. He has served as the chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission and a senior advisor for research and statistics at the DOJ.

He became interested "gun control" as a professor when he tried to assign this as a topic to students. He realized how poor the studies are in this field. He did not own a firearm himself for many years, but finally realized through all his studies that it isn't a bad idea to own one.

Lott is the also the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center. In the early part of 2023 alone, Lott has testified "before the Colorado state Senate, the Vermont state Senate, the Maryland state Senate, the Tennessee state Senate, the Michigan state House and Senate". In December 2022 Lott testified before the US House Judiciary Committee.

Lott does not work as a lobbyist and testifies only when invited by legislators on a committee. In April 2023 he was forbidden to testify by Democrat state Senator Floyd Prozanski during an Oregon Senate hearing on the SB 348 gun bill. The Democrat majority is pushing another gun bill on the heels of trying to vote away Constitutional rights with Measure 114. The Measure was passed by the narrowest of margins and now is held up in court due to being completely unconstitutional and at odds with the Supreme Court Heller and Bruen decisions. Lott commented on Sen. Prozanski's denial to allow him to present facts as a fear that "people will point out that this law [SB 348] is racist and sexist and going to actually put people's lives in jeopardy". Lott Jr states:

My peer-reviewed research finds that a woman getting a concealed carry permit causes a 3 to 4 times larger reduction of the female murder rate, as compared with the effect a man's concealed carry permit has on the male murder rate.

This book was published in 2020. Much has transpired since then regarding 1st and 2nd Amendment rights. Hope Mr. Lott will forgive me this review where some of the latest antics are illustrated on this important topic of US 2nd Amendment rights.

Lott opens with many examples of how media fails to report the actual facts in mass shootings, the majority of which occur in gun free zones. A mass shooting is often followed up by creating more gun free zones, even though the shooters are known to select targets based on gun free zone status. The national media also omits any occurrences of shootings stopped by armed citizens. Those reports are usually only found on local news, if at all. We actually see the extreme bias and lack of accuracy coming directly from the White House as well. See how the President lauds the man who wrestled the gun from the Monterey Park Dance Hall shooter, but fails to recognize that the hero actually turned the gun on the shooter and told him he would shoot if he didn’t leave. He stopped a shooter by having a gun himself. It's as if the President believes everyone should have hand to hand combat skills and be young and ready to fight with an adult male to disarm a weapon. That theory leaves a large segment of society out.

Again,Lott Jr states:

My peer-reviewed research finds that a woman getting a concealed carry permit causes a 3 to 4 times larger reduction of the female murder rate, as compared with the effect a man's concealed carry permit has on the male murder rate.

Firearms are an equalizer.

Then there is the recent media treatment of an elderly white man who feared for his life and shot a black teenager banging on his door at night. His own grandson is on national media throwing grandpa under the bus, the ex-wife is interviewed so we know for sure he is a a-hole, the prosecutor is stating he is going after a Hate Crime status. Meanwhile, a day or so later a black man fires multiple rounds at a 6-year-old white girl who was retrieving a basketball from his yard. The father threw his body in front of his daughter and literally took bullets intended for his daughter. The media is suddenly very quiet. No interviews with the shooter’s family about his criminal past, how much he hates white people, what a jerk he has been. Crickets from the media about the black adult male shooter of a 6-year-old.
Then there is the Louisville Bank shooting by a disgruntled and disturbed young employee. Turns out the young man wrote a sort of manifesto and said he was going to open fire at the bank to prove how easy it is to purchase and use a firearm for mass killing. So a gun control advocate is committing a mass shooting to advocate for gun control? That was hushed up pretty quickly by the media.
Then there is the trans shooter at Covenant School in Tennessee who also wrote a manifesto but the government will not allow it to be published. It’s pretty clear now that trans people are urging violent action on social media, but all this is not mentioned by the national media. Instead the national media insists the shooter is the victim, much like the national leftist media wouldn’t give up on Amber Heard’s abysmal performance on the stand and the clear evidence presented in the Depp v Heard trial because lying women with personality disorders accusing, abusing, and accosting men doesn’t fit their narrative.
It’s pretty clear what the agenda of the national and local leftist media is. Can no longer count the times shootings are reported and never any mention of why it occurred. Never a mention of gangs or cartels.

Lott himself has been locked out of Twitter before it was purchased by Elon Musk for stating some facts around the New Zealand mosque shooting perpetrator

…[the shooter]was a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade…[he believed]his attack would lead to more gun control….

Lott briefly discusses the large disparity of donation money between gun control fanatics like Michael Bloomberg and Constitutional rights NRA. Bloomberg donated $48M from 2016-2016 for gun control propaganda. NRA PACs contributed $2.1M. Bloomberg spent $20M on the Nevada ballot initiative for background checks on private transfers of guns. He probably sunk a lot of money on the Oregon Measure 114 as well.
Lott suggests some commonsense background check reforms that would make the process less discriminatory against poor and middle-class blacks and Hispanic people among other ideas, but gun control advocates will fight any reasonable reform. It’s all or nothing, black and white, cognitive distortion all the way with gun control ideologues.

Lott discusses the studies showing that it is rare for a mass killer to plan an attack in less than six months and lists a number of them. Most take one to two years to plan it out and carefully select their targets where they know people are forbidden to carry firearms and where there is no armed guard. We clearly saw this with shooter Audrey Hale, the Covenant School shooter who selected that school over another with security. We also saw this with the would- be trans teen shooter in Colorado, Will Lily Whitworth, who was reported by a family member in the midst of developing a detailed plan to commit multiple shootings and was analyzing various targets.

In late 2022, independent reporter, Stephen Gutowski, (see "The Reload"publication) reported that the CDC (Center for Disease Control) had quietly removed the defensive firearm use statistic page from its website. Upon further research and the FOIA, Gutowski learned that three people were primarily involved in the removal of the reference. “Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered.” All three people were gun control fanatics:

“Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), argued Kleck’s estimate has been damaging to the political prospects of passing new gun restrictions and should be eliminated from the CDC’s website…..The website change and the fact that it resulted from a lobbying campaign were first reported by The Trace earlier this year. The publication identified Bryant’s involvement and that of Devin Hughes, who runs GVPedia. The new emails revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Konstadinos Moros, a lawyer representing the California Rifle & Pistol Association, showed the nature of that lobbying and the involvement of Newtown Action Alliance chairwoman Po Murray.
Bryant and GVA have gained notoriety for its count of “mass shootings” that uses a much broader definition, with any shooting where four or more victims are injured compared to the Associated Press definition of four or more killed. The difference in methodology results in a near-ten-fold difference in the number of identified “mass shootings.” GVA’s count, alongside its near-real-time tracking of shootings through media reports, has been widely cited by media outlets since it was launched in 2013.
Conversely, GVA uses the most conservative criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use. Instead of attempting to capture any time a person legally uses a gun to defend themselves or others, it only counts incidents that make it into media reports or police reports (though it’s unclear how many police reports they have access to). The site’s methodology takes a strikingly dismissive tone towards any other potential defensive gun uses.

Gun control advocates intend to override the Constitution of the United States of America. The CDC cited statistics of self-defense uses of firearms occur at a rate of 60,000 to 2.5 million times a year in the USA. The wide gap was explained in detail in a link for those who wanted to delve into it.
The media and gun control advocates are ignoring who is committing violence and why. They are trying to convince people that fewer guns will make them safer when the opposite is true. There is a difference between homicide and murder. Lott points out that gun control advocates like to lump justifiable homicides with murders to skew the numbers toward their agenda.
Additionally, Lott points out that people who have concealed carry permits have very little to no crime or suicide uses of their firearms. They are by far the least problematic part of the population of gun owners.
We had between 2.79 to 4 million people enter the US in 2022 with no criminal background check and no information about who they are. Since Biden took office there have been 5 million encounters with people illegally crossing the border. A minimum of 1.4 million are gotaways and are estimated to be 20% higher. In 2023 alone, a minimum of 80 people on terrorist watchlists entered the country. 14, 148 lbs of fentanyl has been brought across the border by cartels, and that is only the amount they actually know of. That is enough fentanyl to kill the entire American population 9.5x over. Five of the nine border sections are totally under the control of cartels under the current administration. Northern California is under the control of cartels. A police officer from a tiny town on the border of Oregon and Idaho was shot last week when making a traffic stop. They apprehended the suspect, and yes, cartel tattoos on his face. Never a word from the media that now police officers are being gunned down in cold blood by cartel members.

Illegal migrants come from all over the 150 countries around the world, many from China and Russia. See independent reporting by Peter Santenello who delves into the border issues in a series of videos posted up on youtube or watch Forbes Breaking News of actual House Congressional Homeland Security Committee questioning of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Ironically, many of the people in Latin America are fleeing violence in their home countries that practice strict gun control. Lott points out that only about 1% of the general population can own firearms in Mexico. El Salvador has incarcerated tens of thousands of gang members to get a grip on the violent crime in their country. Suddenly it is peaceful and safer than it has ever been. Ex pats have been able to go back to their home country to visit family for the first time in decades. Yet people on one side of the aisle think this is unfair to lock up gang members in such large numbers. Can't play the racism card on that one. It's almost as if one side of the aisle is pro-crime and prefers chaos, murder and anarchy. One side of the aisle wants to let the gang problem and all the cultural baggage like pit bulls running amok in neighborhoods flourish. Pit Bull lobbyists have even taken up the racist victim language and insist that any critique of a dog breed is racism. Victimology was just gaining ground in the university’s in the 90s and it seems that is all they teach now.

To illustrate the real-world effect of the universities' leftist drive to teach victim mindset and to view the world in Marxist terms, Democrat controlled state legislatures have had an movement to do away with prisons, lower or do away with bail bond, ignore crime, permit and support open drug scenes and to defund the police. The State of Washington Democrat controlled legislature has passed laws to release Level III violent sexual predators into every county in the state with no oversight. Level III is the absolute worst of the worst who have a high degree of recidivism. McNeil Island residents have been released into communities with no notification to residents or any other agency in violation of Community Protection Act of 1990 (RCW 9A.44.130). Democrats also passed laws in 2021 forbidding law enforcement from attempting to apprehend an escaped resident. At the same time, Washington Democrats are trying to pass some of the most restrictive unconstitutional gun laws in the country. It's as if Washington State Democrats are doing everything in their power to let violent crime grow and flourish. It's almost as if they hate their constituents, we the governed. The entire West Coast is now being governed under these failed "Progressive" policies and all other Democrat run cities with high crime rates.

Other topic Lott addresses are the most commonly used statistics cited by the media supporting unconstitutional gun control measures. Vox, funded by the Rockefeller Institute, has a widely used map and chart system that has been shown to more than 30 million people. Lott addresses 17 claims made in the Vox chart and map disinformation spiel and clearly explains how they are arriving at their data and why it is incorrect. He also addresses claims made by the New York Times and debunks their assertions. One of the most important points in this reader’s view was the fact that the gun control advocates’ “statistics” of how violent the USA is compared to other countries is made by limiting the comparison pool to just a handful of countries: 14 by Vox, 11 by NYT. Lott points out that some of the most violent countries on earth don’t report their statistics.

In Brazil, there are only 330,000 licensed firearm owners in a country of 152 million adults—just .22 percent of the adult population.
But Brazil has a homicide rate that is more than five times that of the US. Only about 1 percent of Mexican adults legally own a gun, but Mexico has a homicide rate that also dwarfs the US rate.

A later chapter reveals how Criminologist Adam Lankford’s “study” was used widely by LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Washington Post, CNN, Sunday Morning Herald (Australia). There are many issues with Lankford’s work, one being that he refuses to release any back up or to show his work for peer review. Lott finds that the US rate of public mass shootings is lower than the global average.

Lott has another chapter on “Politicizing the FBI”

The last part of the book addresses the “Myth of the Lack of funding for Public Health Research on Firearms” followed by a chapter on “Why is it that so much money from the government and Michael Bloomberg goes to funding public health research?”

There were only two areas where I would question Lott, one being on his assertion that former President Trump was a 2A supporter. He does not appear to have been very strong on the topic, in fact the bumpstock ban came into effect during his tenure and is now being overthrown in the courts.

This editorial really soft pedals the facts, presumably to not offend Trump supporters:
https://www.firearmsnews.com/editoria...

There is online video footage of Trump wheeling and dealing with a gleeful Dianne Feinstein over gun control.

His last point is that gun control advocates say that the 2nd Amendment was a relic of the 18th century. It might be good to explain that the 2nd Amendment was based on 1689 English law giving Protestants the Right to Bear Arms after Roman Catholic James II was thrown out and William of Orange installed as King of England.

[Robert Bogue]

Columbo’s catch phrase, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is strangely appropriate when it comes to understanding the facts around gun rights and gun control. Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, The Media, and Botched “Studies” Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control seeks to expose the facts or at least Lott’s perspectives on the facts. He cites dozens of places where the media has made erroneous statements that the public presumably believes.

Read more

[Bill Weldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

common sense prevails

As a Texas born native I used to be afraid of guns. After the Covid scare , I armed myself and started taking many training classes. With any tool you use , you must learn how to properly use it. In addition, regardless of the state you live in, I highly recommend you attain a concealed carry permit. Whether at home or in public you should train to be a sheep dog and not a sheep (victim).

Police response times to 911 calls will never be fast enough for a citizen to protect his family and self from immediate threat to his life.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Les Andrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found about 3/4 of the book beyond what I was reading it for. a lot of these arguments seem more nuanced than my average conversation in this topic. however, the last part of the book I found super helpful with real researched information with all of his resources and ways he collected lasted out plainly tackling some of the important issues like how it's believed the US has a disproportionately high mass public shooting problem and how more relaxed gun laws statistically show a lower murder rate.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stats, not emotions

So much anti-2A emotion on the left, but the statistics they reference are all but entirely invalid, misleading, bad math/science, or worse, falsified intentionally.
John Lott lays out where their statistics are wrong and why, but also shows better ways of analyzing the data in order to make better policy decisions, or to remove those that aren't working at all, criminalizing the legal gun owners, or hurting those who need self-defense weapons the most.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart analysis

Those fighting against anti-virus should keep a copy of these for reference. No use trying to get those who made up their minds without any use of facts or logic to read it, but maybe you can quote them parts.

[Richard Bunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mathematics of gun control.

Mr Lott does not stand on emotion or bias. Just the science and the math. All who want to find solutions to gun violence need to read and understand this work. He also exposes the anti-aging statistics for the lies they are.

[Michael Crouch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading. Found out it is universities (Public education) that funds almost all gun studies. Public health are more anti gun than economic in their studies.

[Dorian Pacheco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book very eye-opening. Regardless of where you stand on the gun debate give this a read to challenge your pre-conceived notions.

[Cynthia R. Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was nice to read the truth about how the media and the government hide information from us regarding shootings in America. This book has information that everyone should hear.