Dr.
John R. Lott is a scholar of world repute who became very famous for
his work concerning gun control. To
say that Dr. Lott is an expert in his field of study may well be an
understatement. His More
Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws
is the seminal work on the influence of guns upon our society.
His new book, The
Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun
Control Is Wrong will undoubtedly add to his reputation and also
to the discussion of gun legality in general. His subject matter and
findings could not be more politically incorrect, and it has made him
a target of the liberal media, but we are fortunate that he has
persevered.
Dr.
Lott is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
and had an extensive career in academia before joining AEI.
He received his doctorate in economics at UCLA, and in the
years thereafter taught at a great many prestigious institutions, such
as The Wharton School (Penn), Yale, Cornell, the
University
of
Chicago
, Rice, and UCLA. Hopefully,
Dr. Lott will continue to have the time to research and write in the
future. As he indicates in
the interview, the battle over whether guns will continue to be legal
in
America
has not yet been decided.
BC:
Dr. Lott, thank you very much for your time.
If there’s one book on the conservative circuit that I see
quoted and showcased ubiquitously, it’s your More
Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.
What made the book such a success? Was your meticulous research a big
reason for its staying power? I recall seeing somewhere that for the
basis of your conclusions, you studied over 3,000 counties in the
United States
.
DJL: Well, it is hard to tell, but possibly it was because the book by
far was the most comprehensive examination of guns and crime. The
first edition of the book represented the largest study that had ever
been done on gun control, examining crime data for all 3,140 counties
in the
U.S.
by year from 1977 to 1994. The second edition extended that up through
1996. Previously, the largest study examining gun control had examined
170 cities during just one single year, 1980. The next largest studies
would look at 32 counties or cities in just one year.
The book was also the most comprehensive in terms of the number of
different gun laws examined and the number of other factors that were
accounted for in explaining changes in crime rates. A partial list of
factors include: arrest and conviction rates, prison sentence lengths,
hiring rules for police, number of police, unionization of police,
policing strategies (community orientated policing, problem orientated
policing, and the broken windows strategy), illegal drug prices, many
different measures of income, unemployment, poverty, and the most
extensive set of demographic factors. Not one previous gun control
study had tried to account for any measures of even law enforcement.
BC: Is the deterrent effect the biggest reason why a higher population
of the citizenry possessing guns decreases the overall rate of crime?
DJL: Crime is reduced because some criminals are deterred from
attacking. But if an attack does occur, guns also prove to be the
safest response for people to make when they are confronted by
criminals and can stop an attack before any harm is done to the
victim. While the deterrence effect is larger, both are important.
BC: What do you say as a response to the person who argues: “Guns
are lethal. If we ban them we save thousands of lives.” I think the
bumper sticker “Where you outlaw guns only outlaws have them”
might be a start. What’s the best rejoinder to this too familiar
argument?
DJL: This is a very important question and it is what motivated my
newest book, The
Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun
Control Is Wrong. I think that the best response is to point
out: Guns make it easier for bad things to happen, but guns also make
it easier for people to protect themselves and stop bad things from
happening. One must then address why people only hear about the bad
things that happen with guns.
I think people have a pretty good idea of the problems that happen
with guns. In 2001, according to government survey evidence, there
were about 450,000 crimes that were committed with guns. Of those,
there were about 8,000 gun murders. But few probably realize that our
best estimates indicate that last year Americans also used guns
defensively, a little bit over 2 million times a year. Roughly
ninety-five
percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to
stop an attack.
Now we're having guns being used to stop crime about four and a half
times more frequently, at least, than they were to commit one.
However, my guess is even people who pay extremely close attention to
the media are unlikely to know anything about the type of ratio that
exists there. My guess is it's probably pretty hard for most people,
when they think about it, to remember the last time that they heard on
the evening television local or national news reports a case where
someone actually used a gun to protect themselves or protect someone
else.
I have to confess, before I looked at this systematically, I kind of
expected there to be a fair amount of lopsidedness in terms of the
coverage. Even with this mindset, I was still fairly surprised by how
unbalanced the news coverage actually is. You can take the major
broadcast networks--ABC, NBC, and CBS--we looked at their morning and
evening news broadcasts for those three networks, their national
television shows, looking at stories that they had about gun crimes as
well as stories that they had about civilians using guns to stop
crimes, and you'd see Good Morning America had about 77,000 words
on--involving stories involving gun crimes; zero with civilians using
guns to stop crimes. ABC World News Tonight had about 13,000 words on
guns crimes, zero examples of civilians using guns defensively. And
you can go on through the other networks.
Basically you have about 190,000 words during 2001 on gun crime
stories, and zero words being spent on any of those news broadcasts
about people using guns to stop a crime or protect themselves or
someone else.
Someplace like the New York
Times, for example, had about almost 51,000 words on
contemporaneous gun crime stories--so those aren't even stories about
follow-ups in terms of trials or whatever, but just within a few days
of a crime occurring. They had just one story, of 163 words in length,
of someone--in this case, a retired police officer--using his gun to
stop an armed robbery at a gasoline station. This was buried way back
at the back of the newspaper. And my guess is they probably wouldn't
even have reported that case if it hadn't been for the fact that the
person was a retired police officer.
Now, a lot of this unbalanced coverage, I think, is understandable, in
the sense that suppose you're a director of a news bureau and you have
two stories. In one case, there's a dead body on the ground, a
sympathetic person like a victim. In another case, let's say a woman's
brandished a gun, the would-be attackers run away, no shots are fired,
no dead body on the ground, no crime actually committed. I think
virtually anybody who would look at that would find the first news
story to be considered a lot more newsworthy than the second. I don't
think there's any debate about it.
But while I think you can explain a lot of this--you know, we may care
about both of those stories in terms of policy, in terms of what types
of things will save the most lives, but surely, in terms of what's
newsworthy, the issue's pretty clear. Yet I don't think that this
explanation explains some very important aspects of how the media
covers guns. There are many crimes that are already deemed to be
extremely newsworthy, that are already getting extensive national and
international coverage. Well, when these crimes were stopped by
someone with a gun, as opposed to some other method being used to stop
the crime, that particular part of the story seems to be
systematically left out of the coverage.
Another example that I think is fairly difficult to explain without
some reference to some type of bias is how the media covers accidental
gun deaths involving kids--something that obviously concerns a lot of
people. And we probably all have seen the public service ads that were
very prominent during the 1990s that the Clinton administration put
out that would have the voices or pictures of children between the
ages of 4 and 8, never a voice or a picture of a child over age 8. And
the impression that we would get from these is that surely we're
talking about young kids who died from accidental gunshots in the home
and that we're talking about something that was essentially at
epidemic-type rates. And it's not just the public service ads, but I
think the media itself has contributed a lot to people's impressions
about the rate at which these deaths are occurring.
When I talk to college students and ask them how many children under
10 die from accidental gun deaths, you frequently get numbers in
thousands. And then you'd ask them, well, what do you think is the
typical case? And overwhelmingly what would come back is, well, it's a
young child who gets a hold of a gun and either accidentally shoots
themselves or another young child. And indeed, that's the type of case
that you see reported in the media overall. But yet, if you go and do
a Nexis search on each of these 31 cases--and we did so; Jill
Mitchell, my research assistant, basically spent a long time going through
and doing these--that you find that if you break down these 31 cases,
there was actually six cases in the United States in that year where a
child under 10 either accidentally shot themselves to death or another
child. If you go back through the data from '95 through '99, you find
that there are between five and nine cases a year in the
United States
.
Whether it's five or nine or six or 31, obviously it would be far
better if it was zero. But I think some perspective is needed here.
You have to consider the fact that there are 90-some million Americans
that own guns, that you're talking about 40 million kids in this age
group. And I would argue it's pretty hard to think of virtually any
other item that's as commonly owned in American homes that's anywhere
near as remotely dangerous that has as low of an accidental death rate
that's associated with it.
BC: Has anyone learned from
England
’s experience with handguns? Do you think that the problems that
they’re having are caused from an unarmed populace?
DJL: It is not just the experience in
England
, but also
Australia
. I think that the increases in gun crime and crime generally indicate
that the restrictions didn’t help.
In 1996,
Britain
banned handguns and also made it a felony for people to use guns
defensively. Prior to that time, over 54,000 Britons owned handguns.
The ban was so tight that even shooters training for the Olympics were
forced to travel to
Switzerland
or other countries to practice. Four years have elapsed since the ban
was introduced and gun crimes have risen by 40%. The
United Kingdom
now leads the
United States
by an almost two-to-one margin in violent crime. Although murder and
rape rates are still higher in the
United States
, the difference has been shrinking. A recent Associated Press Report
notes:
Dave Rogers, vice chairman of the [
London
] Metropolitan Police Federation, said the ban made little difference
to the number of guns in the hands of criminals . . . . “The
underground supply of guns does not seem to have dried up at all.”
An
excellent book on the history of English murder rates is by
Professor Joyce Malcolm, where she argues that murder rates started
falling when guns were introduced into the country and started rising
again after different gun control regulations were adopted.
Australia
also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996, banning most guns and
making it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the next four years,
armed robberies there rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37
percent, assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent. While
murders fell by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent. In
Sydney
, handgun crime rose by an incredible 440 percent from 1995 to 2001.
Again, both
Britain
and
Australia
are “ideal” places for gun control as they are surrounded by
water, making gun smuggling relatively difficult. The bottom line,
though, is that these gun laws clearly did not deliver the promised
reductions in crime.
BC: Your latest book, The
Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun
Control Is Wrong, looks like it picks up where More Guns
left off. What do you address in this book that you did not in your
first?
DJL: This new book tries to add to that discussion on a range of
issues from how guns are used to commit terrorist acts to stopping
terrorist acts to the benefits and risks of having guns in the home to
looking at gun shows and so-called assault weapons bans, among other
things. Yet I think the main reason why I wrote this book is to try to
explain what I see as an apparent gulf that exists between what the
research shows and what people's perceptions are about the costs and
benefits of guns.
I've also heard over time that guns are one issue that facts don't
matter, that emotions are just too strong on this topic for many
people. And I think that's wrong. Facts do matter, but the facts have
to be thought about much more generally than just simple numbers. Guns
are one issue that we're just bombarded with information about. You
can't pick up a newspaper in the morning or listen to the local or
national television and radio news and not constantly hear about
horrific events that happened with guns. And all this information
can't do anything but help inform people about guns. If anything, guns
are one issue where we might just have too much information.
What I tried to explain is why people have the views that they do
about guns.
BC: You’ve done something unique with your new work. You
provide links for the reader to access your raw data. Does this have
anything to do with the Michael Bellesiles scandal involving his data?
DJL: I consistently give out my data from my research. Unfortunately,
a large number of academics do not give out their data. For More
Guns, Less Crime and the research that I have done on concealed
handgun laws, I have given out that data to researchers at dozens of
universities, and researchers have been able to re-estimate every
single regression in that book. Around the time that the new book was
going to come out, a friend of mine was able to set up an internet
site that was able to handle the types of very large data sets that I
have to deal with, so I was able to put it up on my web site (www.johnrlott.com).
Data for other research by me are also on the web site.
BC: Politically, guns appear to be a non-starter for the Democrats at
this time. Do you think that guns eventually will not be a partisan
issue in the future? Do you think that the majority of the American
people support the right to bear arms?
DJL: I am not sure that
guns are definitely a non-starter for Democrats. It depends upon what
part of the country that you are talking about. Right now Los Angeles
is banning .50 caliber guns, Illinois is trying to stop gun shows, the
New York state assembly is voting on much more stringent gun storage
regulations, and in Congress, Democrats in the House are pushing for
greatly expanded bans on so-called semi-automatic assault weapons. If
anything, I think that there is a temporary lull. But if the media
coverage keeps on going the way it is going, it is just a matter of
time until the demand for even more restrictions comes back stronger
than ever.
I think that this can be changed, but it will take a lot of effort.
You will need a change in the types of reports that the government
puts out that only looks at the costs of guns and a greater effort by
groups such as the NRA to try to let people know about how often
defensive gun uses occur. The media should be doing this, but since
they are not, you really don’t have any other alternative other than
the NRA.
BC: You personally have an extensive university background, but do you
think that the presence of so many conservatives at AEI is due to
conservatives not being welcome in our universities? The American
Enterprise Institute published research regarding party and
ideological affiliation at the universities a few months back. The
results seemed to prove that cultural leftists dominate the
professorate.
DJL: Academia is hardly balanced ideologically, but I am not sure that
this is offset by think tanks. There are a lot of liberal think tanks
in
Washington
, from the Brookings Institute to the Urban Institute to many
different environmental groups.
BC: Mr. Lott, your research also includes voting and legislative
behavior. Do you think that voter fraud is a serious issue for us to
be concerned about in the future?
Dr. Lott: I haven’t really done much research on fraud. Most of my
work has been on whether
African-American votes were discounted in
Florida
and whether
the early election call that the polls were closed in
Florida
’s western panhandle lost Bush many votes.
Well,
thank you for your time and insight, Dr. Lott.
