3/30/98 John R. Lott, Jr. john_lott@law.uchicago.edu
Dick Brudzynski: The gun control advocates like the Violence Policy Center and Handgun Control have continually spread these claims about my funding that they know are false. 1) The endowment made by the Olin foundation was raised by the University of Chicago. I had nothing to do with it and absolutely no contact with the foundation. There have been Olin fellows at the University of Chicago since the 1960’s and I did not arrive here until the mid-1990’s. 2) I was given the fellowship as a reward for my past research, none of which has had anything to do with guns. The University of Chicago Law School faculty, which voted to give me the position, never asked what future research I intended to pursue. 3) Of the several hundred Olin fellows at Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, etc. since the 1960’s, I am the only one to do any research on gun control. 4) It is my understanding that the Olin Corporation gets something like one percent of its profits from Winchester ammunition, and that there is no connection between the Olin Corporation and the Olin Foundation. 5) For those interested in a more indepth discussion on this issue please see my new book More Guns, Less Crime. I found how gun control groups attack those with whom they disagree very interesting.
3/30/98 Jeff jeff0097@flash.net
To Dick Brudzynski – First I applaud the fact that you list your e-mail address. This lends a great deal of credibility to your response. Many anonymous posters are just mouthing off and one does not know if they are truely making an arguement or just trying to cause controversy. I must point out that in a recent school shooting, the shooter was held at gunpoint by his vice principal for 4.5 min. until police arrived. Yes the VP was breaking the law by having a firearm on school property but the little psycho was only able to kill 2 classmates until the VP apprehended him. This is not popular so was, of course, usually left out of media reports.
3/30/98 Robert Preston
There were only two things wrong with Mr. Lott’s article. As noted by another, the role of police in America is not as protectors. Secondly, Mr. Lott stated, these states “gave the right” to carry guns to citizens. No sir! The U.S. Constitution “guarantees” the right to carry….. openly, concealed or otherwise! None of the “right to carry” laws would be necessary if government would simply obey the “law of the land,” the Constitution! Each of these states recognize in their constitutions, that the U.S. Constitution is supreme, is the law of the land; and guarantee in their constitutions, the “right to keep and bear arms.” More laws=more government control! David Lenan sounds more like Vladimir Lenin. Need he be reminded that if not for an armed, gun-toting America, he wouldn’t have the right to spew out his stupity here? He contradicts himself, saying GUNS kill people, then says that falling homicide rates is due to baby-boomers getting too old to commit crimes. The 14 – 24 yr olds have always been our biggest criminal element. Homicide rates are falling because baby-boomers are the ones arming themselves and the youngsters fear armed citizens. We’re not too old to shoot street hoodlums! Komrade Lenan also praises “gun free” societies, ignoring their per capita crime rates being higher than America’s, using alternative weapons . . . and have tax rates of 50-68%, and few freedoms. Is that what this moron wants for us? GUNS=FREEDOM! (I’m a retired cop).
3/30/98 Garret Waddel
Right on Chief Preston and John Lott! America is only free because of honest citizens standing up and telling the truth. Paris, France can cite all of the propaganda agents it wants to, but the fact remains, the names they give you are people involved with gun-control/gun-banning politics and organizations. These people in any other decade would have been called what they are: Communist Socialists! If anyone thinks Communism is dead, they’re only ignorantly fooling themselves. The New World Order is all about Socialism (remember Kruchev said in 1961, that Socialists would take over the world without firing a shot). What stands in their way is free, armed societies! Anti-gunners are nothing more than propaganda agents of the New World Order. It’s not a peaceful they want, it’s an un-armed and imprisoned society, incapable of fighting back! Go to hell Paris! America shall remain the land of the free! We’re keeping our guns, for people like you!
3/30/98
V
3/30/98 Kaarlo Elonen
I find it interesting that everyone will admit that drunk drivers kill people but no one says that Dodge or Ford or GMC or Nissan or Toyota or (insert your favorite vehicle) kills people. It’s too easy to blame the gun and not the person using it. However with drunk drivers they will instead put the blame where it belongs and that is with the driver and not with the car. Even the criminals will say that they fear breaking into a house where they know the person has a gun because they don’t want to get shot. If that fear can extend out to the street because they don’t know who is carrying a gun then I’m all for it. The Second Admendment and concealed carry laws are needed just as much today as they were needed 200 years ago. Does anyone really believe that the criminals will turn in their guns if a law was passed that forbide ownership of guns ??
3/30/98 Stan Wojteck
Lott has right. More guns, less crime. I like this book. I am American and a patriot. I dislike peole who comes here argue with us andthat are totally alien to our way and tought process. I am a gun owner and I will never let Socialists and Communists take me off. I have a bill of right and I will take my gun in an airplane. All this immigrants who comes across in my country and steal my job and my house.
3/31/98 F. Lassen Frank57@hotmail.com
I can’t belive the amount of people who want the honest Citizen disarmed. I live in a rural area and it takes the Sheriffs department 40 minutes to get a deputy here when a crime is commited. The place I live is beside a state hwy. leading into another state and when the sheriff is called the criminal goes acrossed the state line. I have called the sheriffs office many times because many drug deals go down here on the Hwy. There response is horrible. I have to keep a loaded gun here as I have had people drive into my yard at 1AM and 2 AM and want directions and they were on drugs or had been drinking a lot. The police and sheriffs jobs is not to protect, it is to apprehend criminals after a crime has been commited. With over 390 million Acres in the United States and only about one percent of the population of approxmately 262 million people in the US on some type of law enforcement jobs, it is easy to see they can’t help you if they are called and you have only seconds to take care of your family during a crime. Require the anti gun crowd to be sign up at police dept. and sheriffs offices saying they don’t believe in guns so the criminals will leave me and my family alone. Gun Control will lead to People Control. Thank You
3/31/98 Rob Waterson rob(at)mindspring(dot)com
I am a proud American and I do not give a damn about how they do things in Europe; we have a different attitude towards government here. I have carried a concealed weapon for several years now and never even had to draw it. I do indeed have a carry permit, but I also know that I do not NEED one; what part of “keep and bear” does the government not understand? HERE IS MY MAIN POINT: Those of you (and it warms my heart to see how many) who firmly believe in the right to keep and bear have to abandon the republicrats and the demopublicans; they have both abandoned freedom and individual rights. I find it interesting that even though they were at odds with one another at the time, both the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist would be considered Libertarians by today’s standards. Take the plunge, vote for freedom!
3/31/98 Mark Wilson
Bob Bailey: You have to differentiate Police Chiefs from Police officers. Every poll that I have read shows that police officers support the rights of citizens to be armed. Police Chiefs, especially those in big cities, are usually political appointees, and as such, usually care more about the policies of the current administration, than they do about the concerns of the citizens.
3/31/98 P (F)
You absolutely right !
3/31/98 Dr. Bill dr.bill@coolsite.net
As a person who has spent many decades dealing with measurements, I have to agree that Mr. Lott’s charts are simply too smooth to be remotely possible. He is clearly misrepresenting some real data that may or may not actually have the trends he presents; there is no statistical validation to back up what he claims with those figures. In addition, we know that violent crime has generally dropped throughout the country, so drops in murder rates etc. that center on the “anti-crime” implementation of gun-toting laws or any other local public policy initiatives of the past decade are likely just coincidental. These compelling scientific arguments having been made, there is still a vague suspicion that Mr. Lott may be correct, even to a staunch anti-gun person such as myself (I grew up in Houston TX when it was the murder capital of the civilized world and always saw stories on the evening news about petty disputes that grew to deadly confrontations given the ready access to guns, or childhood buddies killed during innocent play). Criminals have to think twice about an attack on a potential target who just might have a gun up their sleeve. However, I can’t imagine that such policies would work well in a crowded Manhattan subway, or that they could reduce our murder rates to merely several times that of European countries which don’t even necessarily arm their police.
3/31/98 P (F)
Dr. Bill: You absolutly right Sir !
4/1/98 John R. Lott, Jr. john_lott@law.uchicago.edu
Dr. Bill: The graphs shown in my piece trace out the quadratic regression lines for the periods before and after the concealed handgun law goes into effect. (These were the graphs discussed in the published version of January 1997 study in the Journal of Legal Studies. The version on the web does not contain this information.) If you are interested in the actual year to year variation in crime rates before and after the imposition of the laws, please see pages 136 to 138 of my forthcoming book. However, the bottom line is that for both ways the results look remarkable similar. As to you concerns about how these laws would work in New York city, I have a couple thoughts. The largest cities that I have studied who have changed their laws are Houston and Philadelphia, which why they are not as large as New York are still fairly sizable. The results also strongly indicate that concealed handgun laws reduce crime the most in the most densely populated counties. However, it is possible that the relationship be the passage of these laws and crime rates may change for the city populations above those which I have been able to study. One can only test this by actually changing the law. New York City does currently issue about 8,000 permits, but if one believes that the impact in New York would be different than it has been in other cities, it is possible to change the law gradually in stages.
4/1/98 TomC tcamp@princeton.edu
Benjamin Disraeli once said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I got that quote out of a great little book called ‘How to Lie With Statistics’. For years it has been a little hobby of mine to look at the conclusions of various published studies and surveys, and find the little lies, the outright misrepresentations, the (mis) manipulation of data, etc. Little of the original data is provided, typically, yet often it is sufficient to debunk the conclusions. This tendency to lie with statistics is especially common in studies involving public policy issues where political philosophy usually trumps academic detachment (does that even exist any more?). I have no respect for anyone who intentionally misuses data and statistics to reach conclusions not supported by that data. John Lott: pass. Douglas Weil: fail.
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