Transcripts For CSPAN2 John Lott The War On Guns 20240714

And now on cspan2s booktv, more television for serious readers. John watts discussion on gun control is next from our libertarian conference, freedom fest. [inaudible conversations] all right, well i guess we are having technical problems here but hopefully they will be taken care of soon. I hope you all know who i am. My name is john lott. President of Crime Prevention Research Center bid ive been an academic most of my life. Chief economist at the u. S. Commission and positions that are a variety at different universities. University of chicago, stanford, yale. But im going to talk to you about some of the missed impressions people have about guns and crime. Normally, im a very empirical guy so i would show you lots of graphs and stuff. A little bit stymied on that given the technical issues we have but there are still lots of issues we can go and talk about. So, just off the top of my head, a couple claims we frequently hear about. One is that background checks go and stop about 3. 5 million dangerous prohibited people from obtaining guns. Everybody wants to try to stop for other people who may be dangerous for being able to get a hold of guns. The problem is the claims that are made simply arent correct. Rather than saying 3. 5 Million People have been stopped from buying guns, what they should actually say is there have been 3. 5 million initial denials. And that all of those are mistakes. Its one thing to stop a felon from buying a gun. Its another thing to stop someone similar to another name from buying a gun. The last annual report put out. The obama and menstruation stopped putting out these reports. You had about 76,000 initial denials. You only had 48 cases referred for prosecutions that prosecuted 26 of them. And they got 13 convictions. Often you will hear things like, they are not enforcing the law. But that same tiny rate of prosecutions was true under clinton. Under bush and obama. Republicans attack democrats for not enforcing the law and democrats attack republicans for not enforcing the law. But if you talk to the people who were involved in these agencies, they say theyd love to enforce them if they were real cases. But, just because you have someone thats of similar name to someone you want to stop, to do Enforcement Actions against them . You put down your name, Social Security number, address, birthday, race, eye color. Youre giving them the information you think they are using that information. What they use is roughly phonetically similar names and similar birthdays. I can give you a lot of cases where a lot of people simply because they have similar names to somebody else have been stopped from being able to go buy a gun. The problem is, people in our society have been harmed of the most because of this. Because its primarily minorities that are prevented from being able to go by guns as a result of this process. People tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups. Hispanics have names similar to other hispanics. Blacks have names similar to other blacks. 30 percent of black males in the United States are legally prohibited from owning guns because of past criminal history. Whose names to think their names are most likely to be confused with . Other lawabiding, good black males who want to go and defend themselves and their families . You know, you can go appeal when you have these types of mistakes. The problem is that it cost money. Most people will find it necessary to go and hire a lawyer to go help some. And can cost 3000. A two 10,000 in order to go through the Legal Process to fix it. Through something thats no fault of their own. Not only are you having it so that minorities are overwhelmingly being stopped but its basically middle income and poor blacks and hispanics. My research, if it convinces me of anything, its that the people most likely to be victims of violent crime, poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas. They are the ones that benefit by far the most from being able to buy a gun and protect themselves. It would be great if the police were there all the time to protect people but the police themselves know they virtually always arrive on the prime scene after the crimes occurred. That raises real questions about what people should do when they are having to there we go. Sorry. Okay. Now we are set. Questions about what they should do when theyre having to confront a criminal by themselves. Let me finish up with that and then go back to the main frame i was going to talk about. And that is it would be easy to fix this problem. Theres no reason why these mistakes should be occurring. Companies do criminal background checks on employees all the time. If companies when they did background checks on employees had an error rate that was 100th the rate the federal government has, they would be sued out of existence. If you want to go and debate someone whos pushing these types of background checks, just ask them, why it is that we dont have the federal government having to meet the same standards for joint criminal background checks that the federal government demands that private companies have to meet . If a private company used roughly phonetically similar names, democrats would be screaming bloody murder that that would result in discrimination against minorities. If thats good enough to require that private companies do, why not go require the government had to do the same thing . If you bring this up to gun control advocates, they will be screening poison pill and a your trying to defeat the measure. I personally think the reason they fight so hard against it because its a lot better to say theres 3. 5 million prohibited people who have been stopped from buying guns than to go sing, its 35,000 or Something Like that. Even when you look at those numbers, these are not dangerous criminals. These are usually people who didnt realize they had made a mistake. Ill give you one example. Probably one of the more egregious examples. Theres a man whose 65. His wife had gotten threats at her job. She was going to get a concealed carry permit and he decided as a gift he would go by her handgun. He went into a store been filled out the paperwork there. Turns out 43 years earlier, yet gotten into a fist fight with his brother in their front yard. He had gotten arrested and pleaded guilty to domestic violence. Thats a prohibited thing. The prosecution argued its really didnt forget that he had this prohibition there. They should have understood when he was filling out the form and signing at the bottom saying everything was correct. That he was in fact prohibited from buying a gun. But he was convicted of perjury and sentenced to three years in jail. Those are not the types of people, you are not really getting hardened criminals. Criminals may be stupid but not so stupid that they go to somebody whos going to do a background check when they know theyve spent two years in jail and theyre going to be prohibited to do that. It would be nice if these things could be fixed. Theyd be easy to fix. Ive often told people in the guncontrol movement, if they fix simple things, they can easily get these types of background checks on private transfers past. The fact they will fight against what i regard as very reasonable changes, indicates to me they are not really interested in getting this past what they are more interested in is making it difficult for lawabiding citizens to be able to go get guns. So i want to go to some of the common claims. I dont know if you can see the thing here. Some of the common claims that are made. One of the most common claim is that the United States is unique in terms of firearm homicides. I will just be showing you some graphs that are in the New York Times or a publication called vox, which have gotten a lot of attention over time. And i will try to speak loudly. Anyway, theres a set of 14 countries they have from vox where it shows homicides about 30 per Million People in the United States. Much higher than in other countries. Heres something from the New York Times where they have 11 countries. 11 developed countries with the United States three per 100,000 people. Higher than sweden, canada, switzerland and other countries. There are a lot of issues with this. One of the issues, there are a lot more developed countries. There are like 36 countries that meet the standards for whats considered developed countries. Theres an Organization Called the oecd which is kind of the club for developed countries. Its pulled based on income and production they have. I just want to show you how the United States compares to all countries. Then i will show you with regard to all developed countries. The blue line over here is the average. For homicide rates. The green is for the median. And the red is for the United States. So the United States is well below average. Well below the median. More than half the countries around the world have a higher homicide rate than the United States. There are a couple things to point out. Other people seem to think murders and homicides are the same thing. They are not. And it makes a difference in these types of graphs. The differences homicides are murderers and justifiable homicides. The United States has more justifiable homicides. That would cut our ranking by 20 percent or so from what we have here and would make a significant difference. Most countries dont report murderers. They just report homicides and that makes one difference there. What people often do when they make comparisons across countries is not to look at homicides but firearm homicides. The average is up here, the United States is over here. Much higher than the median. Why is the United States a much higher in terms of firearm homicides and we are in terms of total homicides . If you look at the graph carefully, the lines look thicker. There are a lot fewer names there. 45 percent of the countries in the world dont report firearm homicide data. The countries that dont report data are the countries that have the highest homicide rates. So the reason we look relatively high in terms of firearm homicides is that the countries with high homicide rates arent reporting the firearm homicide rate data. Its not that we are really higher theyre just not providing data for those other countries and that makes us look relatively worse. Ill just mention, on both of these graphs, some of the worst countries dont report the data or report them very accurately. Places like chicago or philadelphia which have had corruption issues in terms of accurately providing crime data. If you just look at developed countries, you can see, there are some developed countries that have much higher homicide rate data that we have in the United States. Russia is much higher. Chile. In the most recent years is actually higher than what we have here in the United States. One thing i will point is is i think its misleading to point out a u. S. Homicide rate because it varies so dramatically. Two percent of the counties in the United States account for over half the murders in the United States. If you ever look, they make up over 20 percent of the population. If you look at whats called a murder map which will map out where murders occur in different counties. What you find is basically within a 10 block area. Within those high murder counties, youll find over half the murders occurring there. So they are heavily concentrated in very tiny areas within the United States. And basically, its a drug gang related. We have a relatively high homicide murder rate compared to many countries simply because we have a much worse drug problem. For example, mexico has an even worse problem than the United States and to have extremely strict gun control laws. Since 1972, theyve only had one gun store in the entire country. Its read by the military. The most powerful rifles you can buy a 22 caliber rifles but not with the drug gangs are using. Basically, just as the gangs bring in drugs from the rest of the world, they bring in weapons they used to do that. So i want to talk a little about another number and i will put these together. Other comparisons people make in terms of gun ownership rates. This is from vox and 2007. You can see switzerland is 46 and so on. I would do this differently. There are real problems with this. The source for this data is called the small arms survey. If youre interested, a look of the data. If you go through the footnotes, youll find they dont provide a source for about 85 percent of the countries. Ive been asking them, can you give me your source because i have problems with the data and they basically refused to go and actually say or they got their data from. So i dont believe these numbers but its nothing you will see all the time in the media. And there are other problems with this. For example, what theyre looking at his private ownership of guns. Switzerland at this point would require all ablebodied males between the ages of 1836 to have a military issued machine gun. And in many cases, a handgun in their home. Now is that the ownership of guns that matter or the position of gun. If youre worried about people behaving responsibly or irresponsibly, the position should matter rather than the ownership. They were to fix this for switzerland and israel, which they say only had seven guns per hundred people. The vast majority of guns are owned by the government. You may be in possession of a gun for 40 years. But the government technically owns it. If you were to fix that, both switzerland and israel in terms of possession rates are higher than what we have here in the United States. You get similar claims here. For example, one of the claims you will see that the United States makes up four percent of the World Population but 42 percent of all civilian owned guns in the world are in the United States. There are lots of problems with this beyond the fact its based on this nonexistent data for a lot of countries. But even the countries they do have data for, they will rely on a survey. Let me give you an example of problems with the surveys. If you look at surveys of long gun ownership. In the 90s or mid1990s, youll 58. 5 million canadians would say they own long guns. When they started the registry, all of a sudden the survey could only find about 3. 5 million canadians that would say they own long guns. It could be you had about five canadians that sold their guns instantly. Or you had them destroy their guns. But you would imagine if you had 5 million canadians that were selling off their guns, it would have been noticed by the media a little bit. The gun stores might have noticed people trying to turn in their guns. Nothing like that is talked about. In fact, there was some increase in sales. You could imagine that once you have a registry and someone calling you up on the phone asking whether or not you own a long gun. [indiscernible] lets put these numbers together. On the one thing i talked about homicide rates are firearm rates across the country. What you really want to do is not look at the number of guns per hundred people. I would argue you want to look at the percentage of the population that owns guns. I could have one percent of the population own 100 guns each or i could have 100 percent own one gun each. If im talking about issues of selfdefense or people behaving improperly, it seems knowingly percentage of the population with guns is a lot more useful number than looking at the number of guns per hundred people. But they use the number of guns per hundred people and you get this type of graph that shows gun ownership here. And then gun related deaths here and they will get this relationship with United States being way out there all by itself. Heres just my own graph showing homicide rates and this measure of going ownership. Im only including some of the developed countries in here. Not including russia or brazil. And ill show you what happens when you change the graph in a minute. But lets say we were to ask a question and the question is, what can United States learn from other developed countries. Including those with high homicide rates like russia and brazil. What you find is in fact the country with this measure of homicide and gun ownership which i have problems with. Since you see them in the New York Times and places like that. I wanted to let you know how sensitive the results are. You find in fact is a negative relationship that more guns are associated with a slightly lower homicide rates. If you add in brazil and russia, it makes it even more negative. Even if you include the United States in there. The thing is, with the United States supposedly way out here by itself. Im using their low numbers for guns for switzerland and israel over here. The United States here all by itself pulls up the line. If you were to fix switzerland and israel, those would be way out here and theyd pull the line back down by themselves. So i just want you to know how sensitive these results are and how it depends on one observation and how they are excluding some of the other observations that are there. If you were to look at all countries. Not just developed countries. You find the countries that have the most guns have the lowest homicide rates. And you can look at it again. You find the countries with the most gun ownership has the lowest homicide rates. We see this also in terms of mass public shootings. This is from the New York Times but they published the same graph a couple different times. They will use the mass public shooting rate from somebody called at the university of alabama. They will show this type of positive relationship. Theres a couple problems with this. One, when langford started putting out these numbers and when the New York Times was using it, he wouldnt give out the list of mass public shootings around the world. He claims from 19662012, 31 percent of all the mass public shooters in the world were from the United States. 200 to the rest of the world. 90 from the United States. That got massive coverage. President obama was constantly siting these claims during his administration to claim the United States was unique in terms of Massive Public shootings. So i got gun control advocates to ask him for his lists. He refused to give it out for years. So finally, a couple years ago, i decided to bite the bullet. At the Research Center, you can find our list of the cases from around the world at www. Crimeresearch. Org. We spent about 70,000. I dont know how to find cases where four people are shot in africa or parts of south america in the 1960s or the 1970s. He never explained how he could get a complete list of these cases from the 1960s and 70s. We just looked at the last 15 years of the. Of the 47 years that he looked that. Rather than the 202 shooters over the whole outside world, outside the United States. Over 47 years, we found over 3000 in just the last 15 years. Rather than using the exact same definition you had in his paper. Rather than the United States making up 31 percent of the mass public shooters, we found less than one percent of the mass public shooters. One percent of the mass public shooters. Way below the world average. In europe, france, finland, norway, switzerland, russia. Major countries plus lots of minor countries have much lower rates. Id say every time we have these mass shootings, this doesnt happen in other countries. Whenever the demonstration was asked for his source, he would go fight this study. When this was out giving out his data. And i can show you lots of comments from media people who had asked over the years for his data and he would refuse. Hes giving it out now but turns out he only included cases where one shooter was involved. Columbine had two shooters. Except for that. Also hes missing lots of one shooter cases. So we put our list together. If you look at the number of People Killed per 100,000 people. And the gun ownership rate, rather than the positive relationship and you get this negative relationship and country with more guns have fewer People Killed in mass public shootings. Even removing the most extreme cases that are there but you still get a negative relationship that countries with more guns have been there are lots of other myths out there. I will mention a couple. One is how many guns to americans own . If you look at places like the New York Times but they will argue that gun ownership has been falling over time. That 30 percent of households own a gun. The one survey they rely on is something called the General Social survey. I will give you a story. A few years ago, i got a call from a producer at abc news. They were doing a series of stories about the risks of guns in the home. I was talking to them about our andahalf. For the end of the conversation, she said well, at least this will be too much of a problem in the future because fewer and fewer households are having guns. I said well, im not really sure. I said i assume you are relying on the General Social survey. I said to you know that abc news, you have your own survey and your own survey doesnt show the drop that it shows its basically flat over time over the percentage of the population . And she didnt believe me. I said i can send you a copy of your own survey. So i did that. Later, abc news has a series of stories on the evening news and good morning america. Nightline. On 2020 about the study they done about the risks of guns and homes. All the time when they would mention it, mentioning the fact that gun ownership is falling and only 30 percent of american households own it. This is abc news own results. That looks pretty flat to me. As compared to the one they ended up using. They didnt mention in their own survey, they had very different results. To give you an idea, there is the General Social survey heres the most recent survey from a lot of sources. Abc news. General social survey. Quinnipiac. Cnn. Cbs. Ugov. Nbc. Wall street journal. Theres a couple issues with this. These surveys are often done shortly after a mass public shooting. So theres issues about whether the news might affect whether people will say they own a gun or not. But you can see here, the blue line shows the percentage of people that said their household on the gun. The first is people who basically refused to answer the question. And the green is the burnt orange. You can see here you can see the General Social survey is a real outlier. You look at the ones from the wall street journal, nbc news. They have 4647 percent of the population that say their household owns guns. If you adjusted as i was saying. Youre pretty close to half of households that say they own a gun. This reasons for believing this event underestimates it. Just give you one out of many reasons and that is, married women are much less likely to say a gun is owned in the home then married men are. It could be the guy has a gun and hes not telling the wife about it. I suppose thats a possibility. Organize guys my about owning guns when they dont own a gun. My guess is the opposite may be more likely to be true. But women, particular after you have one of these mass public shootings might be reticent to say a gun is in the home. Or maybe reticent to tell people that they told us how they defend their families. But there are good reasons to believe that when you adjust, youll end up with more than half of households owning a gun. So why do they pick this one low survey number that they keep on using time after time. I think they want to make gun owners feel somewhat isolated. Makes them feel that fewer and fewer people are wanting to own guns over time. I will give you one example for the survey. If you look at illinois, you have to have a card to own a gun in illinois. Its a license to own it. Theres been a huge increase. Almost doubled over the last 15 years or so. It claims theres been a 30 percent drop in gun ownership and so you have fewer people think they own a gun at the same time, the pandas huge increase in cards there. The other thing you can look at is the number of concealed permits. There were about 2 million in the United States in. There are about 18 million right now to have concealed carry permits. Even that underestimates the increase because back in 1998, you only had one state that was a constitutional carry state we didnt have to have a permit to carry. Now you have 16 states that are constitutional carry. The people in those states dont need to get a permit to carry. When the state no longer requires a permit, you get a permit to carry outside your state for reciprocity. You are seeing the number of permits basically level off. It really underestimates the growth you have there. It gives you an idea that gun ownership rates have been changing a lot more than people might think. I will mention one survey quickly. This is a different question. This is on whether or not you think teachers should be armed. If you look at all of the results, slightly more adults are against teachers being on to then support. 4843 percent. To the teachers who have the most can in the game so to speak. Strongly support teachers being able to own guns. They have about 59 percent support. The opposition to teachers having guns, basically comes from adults who dont have kids. One of the things we frequently hear is about the risk of people having guns. Concealed carry permit actually provide very Interesting Data on this. Because what you find is that we have these 18 million permit holders. But they are incredibly lawabiding. If you look at firearms related violations. Youre talking about people losing their carry permit for any type of firearms related violations at thousands or tens of thousands of one percentage point. And police are really convicted of firearms convictions. They are convicted at about less than 1 20 the rate of the general population. But permit holders are convicted of firearms violations at about 1 10 the rate that Police Officers are. The Police Officers are really convicted and permit holders or even much less really convicted. I can go through this numbers. One thing you will frequently hear about his guns and suicides. One of the claims is that well, what makes guns so dangerous in terms of suicides is that they are very successful in committing the suicide. A lot of the research thats done just looks at firearms suicide. For me, an economist generally will look at a total suicide. If you see any change in terms of total suicides. Even if you see a drop in firearms suicides. Successful in committing suicide, only 7 are poisoned but 97 of firearms were used in suicide are successful. So thats the rope why we should get rid of firearms. Heres a slightly broader set because they tend not to report the results for all the different types of methods of suicide. Shotgun to the head, very successful. Cyanide, is about 98 successful in committings center field gunshots to the headquartered 98 . Explosives, 97 . I dont know if you have been to japan. Japan for many years has had a big problem with people going in front of trains, and you get hit by a train, youre gone. And thats about 97 successful. Jumping from a height, like a bridge or building, thats almost as successful. Hanging is over 93 success rate there. So there are a lot of ways of committing suicide which are also similar in terms of, quote, success rates, in terms of committing suicide if thats what you want to try to do. Interestingly enough theres some data that most of these other types of suicides are actually less painful than shooting yourself. Theres one other thing i want to go through quickly and that is just the claim but a australia, this is something that we hear about all the time and that is, australia had a gun buyback in 1997 and 97. The claim is reduced firearm homicides by 60 , had a similar drop in terms of firearm suicide. Heres the when they did the buyback, they reduced the number of licensed guns from 3. 2 million to 2. 5 million. Guns werent banned. People were able to go and buy guns again. Bit 2010 the gun ownership rate in australia was clearly above what it was before the buyback so you had a drop in licensed guns, over time increased. So you should have imagined if this really had the effect on crime there should have been immediate sharp drop in the increase over time. What you find when you look at this so theres two different this is for firearm suicide and this is for nonfirearm suicides. You can see for both firearm suicide and firearm homicide, the death rates were falling for 15 years prior to the buyback. They continue to fall afterward but at a slower rate. Lets say i were to take a Straight Line, perfectly Straight Line, pass a law in the middle and just compare the before and after averages. I could pick any point along the Straight Line and the after average is going to be below the before average. But if i looked at a perfectly Straight Line it didnt vary at all, i would say, well, the after average is below and thats what everybody reports, but it seems like pretty misleading because if i look at the line its perfectly straight. What you would like to do is say, was there did it follow at a slower rate or faster rate have the charge . Some type of discontinuity that occurred . What you find is if you look at either fire suicides or firearm homicide it actually fell more slowly after the buyback than it did before. I have five minutes . Ill go through one other thing. This is something that the New York Times pushes a lot just within an oped in the last couple of weeks. This is from nicholas christoph. He has a graph they like show show where car deaths are falling over time, and the claim is if we can only regulate guns like we regulate cars, we could go and save lots of lives, and theyll show that you have seatbelts here. Of course the First Federal regulations werent until the mid1960s and continued to fall there. But let me just show you. If they went back to an earlier period to 1920, which we have the data, automobile death rates were falling dramatically all over the period of time before we had any federal regulation. Companies competed against each other in term owed shatter proof collapse, collapsible steering columns, see belts were. In cars before helped. When the federal government get involved, the rate stops falling for a few years and then when their first regulations went into effect it started falling but at a slower rate than before. Why did the federal government involvement cause again what people always do they always say, what is the actual death rate after the law versus before . But its been falling over the whole time. Actual deaths of everything fall over time. Why did it fall more slowly . Well this, reason why its fell more slowly after the federal government got involved is because when the federal government says, have airbags, they just dont say, have airbags. What they do is they you all have airbacks. Designed in exactly this way, theyll be installed in exactly this way, they micromanage exactly howl the company is to do it but let say your General Motors orford and you want to put air bags in your cars well if you put them in before the government tells you how your supposed to do that. Youre going to put maybe billions of dollars of investment into figuring out how you would design it. And then what happens if a year or two after you have done this, the federal government comes out with their own regulations, and theyre telling you, the airbags have to be designed differently, installed differently, may use different chemicals or whatever thats there what do you have to do . You have to rip out all that investment that you have there, and put in a whole bunch of new money to go and have it meet the exact specifics of the federal government. Well, with that hanging over your head, what does that do to Car Companies going out on their own to go and try to improve the safety of their cars . They dont do it. They wait until the federal government tells them how to do it, and then guess what . The federal government isnt really fast in doing things. Know you all will be shocked. I know probably never happened with government regulations or anything else in the past. And so it actually slows down the rate of safety improvements. People dont see that because theyre always just comparing the before and after averages that are there, but if you see in terms of the rate decline, it slowedded down a lot. A lot of other things i could go through here and what i would suggest you can go to the web site, crimeresearch. Org, we go through this and many other types of myths that exist there on guns and crime. Id also suggest i dont know if an email list was passed about but good to our web site after 230 seconds or so a little popup will occur you subscribe our email list, and every couple of weeks the Crime Prevention Research Center, a group of academics that do research on these questions, and well have kind of the current topics there. I dont know how many peep subscribe to our email list . You people. Do you like it . Find it useful . Okay. Shaking his head yes. So both are. Anyway, i think youll fine it useful. Were basically a group of academics from harvard, university of chicago, the whatten business school, university of michigan william mary that do research and try to make sure people are educated along the lined ive been talking about so far. Ill be going back to the booth. If you want to go back there and talk more, aisled be happy to talk to you afterwards. Crimeresearch. Org the words crime, research,. Org. Thank you very much. [applause] president [inaudible conversations] here are the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the los angeles times. Terra westovers account of growing up in the idaho mountains and her introduction to formal education at age 17. Good her book educate on best seller hiss for over a year. Next in the pioneers David Mccullough recounts the junioriesve early settlers of the northwest territory. 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