Author: John Lott

The Excel file with detailed information on the 88 mass public shootings from 1998 through May 15, 2022, is available here. With all the discussion about having another assault weapon ban, only 14% of mass public shootings are done solely with any type of rifle. Twenty-nine percent involve only a rifle or a rifle in combination with a handgun and/or a shotgun. Among the other findings, about 9 in 10 of the attacks are in gun-free zones (though over the longer period from 1950, 94% of the attacks are in gun-free zones), half of the shooters are over age 30 and over 80…

Another horrible tragedy occurred on Tuesday with the attack on the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. With 19 elementary school students slain, President Joe Biden was right when he said Tuesday night that Americans have had enough. Unfortunately, his proposals won’t solve the problem. Just as with so many of these attackers, the man who attacked Robb Elementary School picked a place where people were banned from carrying concealed handguns. For example, the perpetrator of the Buffalo shooting from a couple of weeks ago wrote in his manifesto: “Areas where” carrying with a concealed weapon “are outlawed or prohibited may be good…

UPDATE: The New England Journal of Medicine has a letter making the claim that children are more likely to die from guns than any other cause. The piece contains many misleading or false claims. Their measure of deaths from guns primarily involves homicides from the CDC, which produces a much larger number than the FBI UCR data. For example, in 2020, there were 1,623 homicides for those under 20 years of age according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and 2,811 according to the CDC. If you look at just those under 18, what most would classify as children and adolescents, the total number…

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deliberating on the constitutionality of New York’s “may-issue” concealed handgun law. The ruling will be made within the next few months and will determine whether people have to provide a special reason for getting a concealed handgun permit to defend themselves and their families. But after last week’s shooting on a New York City subway platform, the stakes are even clearer. The question of banning guns from “sensitive places” was mentioned 30 times during oral arguments last November. Subways were discussed 11 times. “The idea of proliferating arms on the subway is precisely, I think, what…

By a margin of 52% to 40%, voters believe that “cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” That’s per a Rasmussen Reports survey from this month. This stands in stark contrast to the countless news stories editorializing about “no evidence of voter fraud” and “the myth of voter fraud.” It isn’t just Republicans who believe this cheating occurred. Even 34% of Democrats believe it, as do 38% of those who “somewhat” support President Biden. A broad range of Americans think this: men, women, all age groups, whites, those who are neither white nor black, Republicans, those who are neither…

If a criminal figures out a more effective way to break into people’s homes to steal more, should he receive a lighter sentence per dollar of what he steals? Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, certainly thinks so. The legal system doesn’t normally work that way. If a rapist rapes two women, he gets two sentences, one for each crime. Each crime a criminal gets convicted for gets a separate penalty. That has traditionally been true for child pornography, where more pictures of children mean crimes have been committed. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary…

Twice in thirty days, YouTube censored videos of mine on topics that I previously covered for Real Clear Investigations and Real Clear Politics. The video platform blocked me from posting anything for two weeks, and said that the ban would be permanent if another violation occurred in the next 90 days. In January, a violation was issued after I posted a video on the problems with mail-in voting in Missoula County, Montana (“A River of Doubt Runs Through Mail Voting in Big Sky Country,” Real Clear Investigations, March 24, 2021). A recount of the mail-in ballot envelopes found that 4,592 (6.33%)…

Fact-checkers keep assuring Americans that President Biden doesn’t want to ban guns, but simply wants “reasonable” gun regulations. Yet judging by the president’s rhetoric, Biden either doesn’t know much about guns (a concerning possibility given his constant push for more regulations) or is calling for a complete ban on the vast majority of guns sold in the U.S. Just last Thursday, when Biden spoke in New York City about combatting gun crime—not the 92 percent of violent crime that has nothing to do with guns—he focused on handguns. A “Glock with 40 rounds—a magazine with 40 rounds. And it’s really a…

Federal law explicitly prohibits the creation of a federal firearm registry, but the Biden administration is making one anyway. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has collected nearly one billion firearm purchase records. The government has now created a searchable digital database containing 866 million of these transactions, including some 54 million made in 2021 alone. This massive data collection effort encompasses information on all guns sold by licensed gun dealers, and on all legal gun transfers in states with so-called universal background checks. So, federal officials will have the name of everyone who legally obtained a…

With violent crime increasing over the last two years, Americans want a solution. But President Joe Biden constantly frames violent crime as only a gun problem. Again, it was the sole focus of Biden’s speech in New York City on Thursday. Even when he mentions police or prosecutors, it was in terms of enforcing gun control laws. But this “guns first” approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. And while Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically. Biden’s proposal yesterday to…