Author: John Lott

Although one wouldn’t know it from the media coverage of gun control, the best social science has shown that law-abiding citizens frequently deter criminals. But when ideology trumps facts, policymakers are easily led astray. The latest example is occurring in Brazil, where massive increase in gun ownership in recent years has prompted gun control advocates to reinterpret the data in ways that conform to their political views. In his first act in office last Sunday, newly installed President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a decree freezing gun ownership and banning the sale of new ammunition. Lula also instituted other…

If you only read New York Times editorials, you’d believe that political violence in America is a “right-wing” problem. The Times has been warning of violence from the right for years, but on Nov. 19 and 26, they wrote two long editorials making these claims. The violence stems from the lies “enthusiastically spread” by Republican politicians. Democrats’ only complicity was their $53 million in spending on “far-right fringe candidates in the primaries.” The fringe candidates, it was hoped, would be easier to beat in the general election. Both editorials mention the mass murderer in Buffalo, New York, as a political…

Red flag laws are the top priority of Democrats and gun control advocates. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support these measures – by margins ranging between 2-1 and 3-1. Congress recently passed legislation providing funding for states that adopted these laws. But the polling doesn’t really gauge whether Americans understand how these laws operate. The surveys generally just ask people if they support laws that “allow guns to be temporarily confiscated by a judge from people considered by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others.” Respondents might reasonably assume that a normal legal process is being followed, whereby complaints are…

If we can enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1960’s data retention requirements, we will be able to help restore confidence in our elections. Unfortunately, election officials across the country are not keeping the most basic data to monitor election outcomes. Even when they say they do, the numbers do not come close to matching up. It was a simple goal: match the number of voters with the number of ballots cast. After the last general election there were concerns that ballots were counted multiple times (so that there could be more ballots cast than voters who voted) and that…

Last week, Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Democrat John Fetterman said that requiring a voter I.D. is “insidious and unnecessary,” “outrageous,” “illogical,” “unfair,” and “simply voter suppression.” He says that concerns about vote fraud are a myth. But if concerns about vote fraud are a delusion, it is a delusion shared by virtually all other countries and by the vast majority of American voters (79%). All 47 European countries, except for parts of the United Kingdom, require a government-issued photo I.D. to vote. The U.K. has introduced legislation to mandate I.D.s, which are already required in Northern Ireland and parts of…

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden traveled to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to attempt to “flip the script” on Republicans with a law-and-order campaign message. The theme of Biden’s speech was that “the answer is not to defund our police departments—it’s to fund our police.” Biden’s speech certainly involved a lot of flipping. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden was asked whether he supported “redirect[ing] some of the funding for police into social services.” At the time, he responded, “Yes, I proposed that kind of reform.” In Biden’s three previous speeches on violent crime, his focus has almost exclusively been on gun control. He certainly didn’t say anything…

A lot of people are moving out of California. Over the last two years, California has lost about 300,000 people. Major companies, including Telsa, Oracle Corp, and HP have abandoned California for Texas. With high taxes, lots of regulations, high crime, poor schools, mishandling of the pandemic, and “woke” policies, it isn’t surprising that many people have been willing to give up the beautiful state and fantastic weather. Understandably, some are upset with that turn of events, but the billboards put up in Los Angeles and San Francisco are a cheap shot. They warn Californians about mass public shootings in…

The shooting that killed three people and injured another at a Greenwood, Indiana, mall on July 17 drew broad national attention because of how it ended – when 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, carrying a licensed handgun, fatally shot the attacker. While Dicken was praised for his courage and skill – squeezing off his first shot 15 seconds after the attack began, from a distance of 40 yards – much of the news coverage drew from FBI-approved statistics to assert that armed citizens almost never stop such attackers: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press);…

Professor Carl Moody and Dr. John Lott have written up some comments on the latest Donohue et al. paper on concealed carry. For some perspective, you can see the academic literature on the issue here and the Amicus brief that we filed with a literature survey here. Overall, Donohue uses dramatically different specifications and control variables across his multiple papers on right-to-carry laws, which speak of someone running as many specifications as possible to get the desired results. The problem is that measuring the impact of the right-to-carry law with a simple dummy variable not only ignores that more permits are issued over…

We put five children through college (one is still attending). We saved up. We never took out any loans, as we didn’t want our kids burdened with debt. Our kids went to William and Mary, Mary Washington, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania. So far, the total costs for these colleges have been well more than $600,000. Last week, Biden forced taxpayers to assume nearly $6 billion in federal student loans for 560,000 borrowers. News stories announced the decision on forcing taxpayers to pay off the loans for others appears delayed until closer to the election. While some debt is likely…