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Posts Tagged ‘John Lott’
October 20th, 2017 at 11:57 am
Stat of the Day: Everywhere Guns Are Banned, Murder Rates Increase
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John Lott, our favorite economist at least in the arena of criminology and Second Amendment scholarship, cogently summarizes the actual, real-world, data-based sociological effect of “gun control” laws:

While gun bans (either a ban on all guns or on all handguns) have been imposed in many places, every time guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up.

One would think that one time, just out of simple randomness, murder rates would have gone down or at least stayed the same.  Yet in every single case for which we have crime data both before and after the ban, murder rates have gone up, often by huge amounts.”

It’s almost as if more guns mean less crime.

October 7th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
RADIO SHOW LINEUP: CFIF’s Renee Giachino Hosts “Your Turn” on WEBY Radio 1330 AM
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CST)/5:00 pm (EST): John Lott, Jr., author, researcher, teacher, and former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission: “Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench”;

4:30 (CST)/5:30 (EST): Megan Brown, Partner at Wiley Rein LLP: Supreme Court Preview October 2013 Term;

5:00 (CST)/6:00 pm (EST): Dan Epstein, Executive Director of Cause for Action: The Threat ObamaCare Poses to Privacy of Americans; and

5:30 (CST)/6:30 pm (EST):  Drew Johnson, CFIF and  Senior Scholar for the Taxpayer Protection Alliance: Government Shutdown and Government

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

September 16th, 2013 at 6:39 pm
Navy Yard Tragedy Marks Yet Another Failure of Gun-Free Zones

Don’t we ever learn?

Within seconds of initial reports leaking out about Tuesday’s attack that left the apparent killer and 12 others dead in the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C., liberals and anti-gun activists took to Twitter to demand tougher gun controls laws.

Apparently in their haste to exploit a tragedy for political capital, these gun opponents didn’t take the time to recognize that the shooting took place in a gun-free zone — in the city with the most restrictive gun laws in America.

In fact, the mass shooting sprees at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech, the Cinemark Theater in Aurora, Colo., and Tuesday’s appalling episode at the Navy Yard all occurred in gun-free zones.

The reality is that mass gun violence almost only occurs in gun-free zones. Economist John Lott, recently discovered that “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

Why are gun-free zones so ineffective? The answer is obvious:  A gunman knows the innocent people inside gun-free zones will be sitting ducks, unable to defend themselves or mount a resistance against someone carrying a gun.

No matter how much gun opponents want to claim otherwise, implementing more silly gun control measures or increasing the number of gun-free zones will only lead to more mass shootings. The easiest way to prevent tragedies like the Navy Yard shooting is to allow more responsible adults to take guns more places.

May 17th, 2012 at 10:41 am
Podcast: Stand Your Ground Laws Don’t Encourage Vigilantism
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In an interview with CFIF, John R. Lott, Jr., economist and bestselling author of “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias Against Guns,” discusses the statistical relationship between Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws and the reduction in violent crimes, whether Florida’s Stand Your Ground law applies in the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case, and his latest book, “Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do to Regain Our Future.”

Listen to the interview here.

May 14th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
THIS WEEK’s RADIO SHOW LINEUP: CFIF’s Renee Giachino Hosts “Your Turn” on WEBY Radio 1330 AM
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 (CDT)/5:00 pm (EDT):  Arthur Brooks, American Enterprise Institute President – “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise”;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Professor John Lott, Economist – Stand Your Ground Laws;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Clint Bolick, Hoover Institution Research Fellow and Director of the Goldwater Institute Center for Constitutional Litigation – “Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court”;  and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Rich Noyes, Media Research Center’s Research Director and a senior editor at NewsBusters.orgMedia Bias.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

April 9th, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Obama’s Spending vs. Canada’s Cuts

It’s been said by some supporters of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus spending spree that we can’t really know if it failed because we can’t ‘re-run’ the last three years to see if something else might have worked.

But according to economist John Lott, we don’t have to.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Caller about his new book, , Lott compares the different approaches by the liberals in Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We can Do Now to Regain Our Future the Obama White House and the conservatives running Canada’s government.  The results aren’t pretty.

How do we know the stimulus package made the economic situation worse?

Compare the U.S. and Canada. Their unemployment rates increased in lock step from August 2008 until six months later, in February 2009, when the stimulus was passed in the United States. During those six months, the U.S. unemployment rate rose by 2.1 percentage points, from 6.1 percent to 8.2 percent, and the Canadian rate grew by 1.9 percentage points, from 5.1 percent to 7 percent (using the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] measure to make the Canadian measure of unemployment comparable to the U.S. rate). The graph that we have showing this is actually stunning.

Canada adopted a much smaller and quite different “stimulus” program that emphasized cutting tax rates and regulations and that produced dramatically smaller deficits. On a per-capita basis, Canada’s stimulus was about a third that of America’s, costing $979 per person compared to our $2,730. The conservative Canadian government chose not to introduce any big programs.

Obama, meanwhile, adopted big-ticket Keynesian programs, believing that government spending for its own sake creates wealth. But Democratic emphasis on “green” energy, government-approved investments and technology and higher salaries for public-school teachers merely moved money away from where Americans and companies would have otherwise spent it.

Obama’s stimulus also raised the effective marginal tax rates that some individuals face, discouraging work; Canada, by contrast, cut some marginal rates. Obama kept the corporate tax rate stuck at 35 percent, while Canadians cut their corresponding rate from 21 percent in 2007 to 16.5 percent this year — with a further cut to 15 percent planned for next year. By last year, Canada had the lowest overall tax rate on business investment of any major industrialized country.

Canada also didn’t run the huge stimulative deficits that we ran here in the U.S. They didn’t saddle their kids with a huge debt that they were going to have to pay off.

But if Obama’s program — including a massive 21 percent hike in spending from 2008 to 2011 and corresponding massive deficits — worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more since those policies were adopted than have the rates of the European Union, South America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand?