Author: John Lott

With violent crime soaring over the last two years, Americans want a solution. Over and over, President Joe Biden and gun control advocates frame violent crime as a gun problem. Relying on public health researchers, articles such as this one in The Atlantic and in local news stories this week point to increasing gun sales as the cause. But reported gun crimes fell in 2020, so the writers ignore the obvious explanation for rising crime, that law enforcement isn’t being allowed to do its job. Gun sales increased dramatically in 2020 before receding some in 2021. Background checks on gun sales soared from 12.4 million…

Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom’s comments are more likely to gin up anger from their supporters than have anything to do with the Supreme Court or the law. You would never know it from the reaction of President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Friday about the Texas abortion case didn’t overturn Roe v. Wade. It dealt with arcane legal precedent over who can sue and be sued – what is called “standing” – and the constitutionality of Texas’ law is far from settled. On Saturday, hopefully because Newsom hadn’t yet read or understood the decision, he announced he would now…

According to a new Gallup poll, support for stricter gun control has fallen by 15 percentage points in just the last five years. But, despite the drop being driven by independents’ changing views, Democrats aren’t likely to rethink their support for more gun control. The partisan divide on this issue has never been so large — 91% of Democrats and only 24% of Republicans support stricter laws. While Democrats claim they want “reasonable” or “common sense” laws, you get an idea of how stark the partisan differences are by considering the response to Gallup’s question about whether people support a complete…

This article originally appeared in RealClearPolitics. If one terrible thing happens with a gun, gun control activists reflexively call for bans or other new regulations. There is rarely a consideration of costs and benefits. Actor Alec Baldwin has demonstrated this thinking again after the accidental fatal shooting on the set of his movie in New Mexico. “[H]ow many bullets were fired in movies and TV shows over the last 75 years?” he said on Saturday. “… Billions? In the last 75 years? And nearly all of them without incident. … Some new measures have to take place. … No live ammunition. No…

Dr. John Lott’s newest piece at Newsweek starts this way. When it decides on NYSRPA v. Bruen—scheduled for oral arguments today—the Supreme Court will have a chance to stop governments from restricting the right to “bear arms.” The part of the Constitution guaranteeing that right has long been ignored by many state and local governments, despite previous Supreme Court rulings that there is an “individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” in the home. The situation is worst in New York, California and six other “may-issue” states, where officials can turn down requests for a carry permit for any reason, or…

If you don’t prosecute the few gang members police catch, guess what? You get more violent crime. More than 70 shell casings were found at one of the latest horrifying crime scenes to rock Chicago. Per the Chicago Sun-Times: Five men linked to a deadly gang-related shootout Friday in Austin were released from custody after prosecutors declined to charge each of them with a pair of felonies, including first-degree murder, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.The brazen mid-morning gunfight, which left one shooter dead and two of the suspects wounded, stemmed from an internal dispute between two factions of the Four Corner…