Crime Prevention Research center. Ive been an academic most of my life. Chief economist at the commission, ive had positions that in a variety of different universities Like University of chicago, stanford, yale. Im going to talk to you a little bit about some of the misimpression that people have about guns and crime. Normally im a very empirical guy. I would go and show you lots of graphs and stuff. Im a little bit stymied on that be given the technical issue we have here. But theres still a lot of issues we can go to talk about. Just off of the top of my head, a couple of the claims that we frequently hear about, one is that background checks. They go and stop about 3. 5 dangerous people from prohibiting guns. Everybody wants to try and stop criminals are the people who might be dangerous from being able to going get a loaded gun. The problem is that the claims that are made, simply arent correct. Rather than saying 3. 5 Million People have been stopped from buying guns, with they should actually say is that they have been three and half million initial denials. That almost all of those are mistakes. Its one thing to stop somebody who is a felon from buying a gun, its another thing to stop somebody simply because they have a name similar to someone who cannot buy a gun. For example, the last full annual report that was put out on the background check system in 2010, the Obama Administration stopped putting out these reports. Yet about 76000 initial denials. You only had 48 cases referred for prosecution. They were prosecuted 26 of them and they got 13 convictions. Often you hear things like, theyre not enforcing the law. The thing is that same tiny rage of prosecutions was driven to clinton, to under bush, true under obama. Republicans attack democrats were not enforcing the law democrats attacked republicans for not enforcing the law. He talked to the people who are actually involved, and these agencies, they said they would love to enforce them if they were real cases. Just because you have somebody who hamza similar name to somebody they want to stop, youre not going to know and do Enforcement Actions against them. When you buy a gun, you fill out something called the 4473. You put that on your name, your soldiers giving number, your address, your birthday, erase, your eye color, giving them all that information and you think theyre using all of that information. With the use, is roughly phonetically similar names and similar birthdays. I can give you a lot of cases where people have simply because they have similar names to somebody else, have been stopped from being able to go and buy a gun. The problem is, that its most Vulnerable People in our society who have been harmed the most. As a result of this. Its primarily minorities that are prevented from being able to go buy guns as a result of this process. People tend to have names similar to others in the racial groups. Hispanics and name similar to others hispanics, blacks and name similar to other blacks, 3e United States are legally prohibited from owning guns because of past criminal history. Whose name do you think their names are most likely to be confused with question mark other lawabiding good black males who want to go into for themselves and their families. You can go and appeal when you have these types of mistakes, the problem is that it costs money. Most people are going to find it necessary to go and hire a lawyer to go and help them. I can cost 3000, up to 10000, in order to go through the legal process. Something that is actually no fault of their own. Not only are you having so minorities are overwhelmingly being stopped but its basically middle income and poor blacks and hispanics are being stopped. My research convinces me of anything, is that the people are most likely to be victims of violent crimes, poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas. They are the ones who benefit by far the most for having a gun to be able to go and protect themselves. Would be great if the police were there all of the time to protect people but the police themselves know that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime occurred. That raises real questions about what people should do. When theyre having to. [inaudible conversation] now reset, question about what they should do. Let me just finish up with that and then ill get back and go to the main thing that i was going to talk about and that is it would be easy to fix this problem. There is really no reason by these mistakes should be occurring. Companies do criminal background checks and employees all the time. If Companies Made background checks on employees in error per rate that was 100 the error rate the federal government had, they would be sued out of existence. You want to go in debate someone who is pushing these types of background checks, just as them, why it is that we dont have the federal government having them meet the same standards for doing criminal background checks with the federal government demands and private companies and they have to meet. In the private company just used roughly phonetically similar names, democrats would be screaming but he murdered that that would result in discrimination against minorities. Well wipe if thats good enough to require the private companies to do, when i go and require the government has to do the same thing. But if you bring this up to gun control advocates, they will be screaming poison pill. They will say that youre trying to defeat the measure. I personally think the reason why if i so hard against it is because its a lot better to say there is 3. 5 million dangerous or prohibited people of been stopped by handguns than to go and say is 35000 or Something Like that. Even when you look at those numbers, these are not dangerous criminals. These are usually people who didnt realize that they had made a mistake. Ill give you one example, one of the more egregious examples. There is a man who 65, his wife would gotten threats at her job, shes going to get a conceal to carry permit. He decided that as a gift, he would go and buy her a handgun. He went into a store, filled out the paperwork, it turns out that 43 years earlier he had gotten into a fist fight with his brother in the front yard. The neighbors had called the police. He had been arrested. And he pleaded guilty to Domestic Violence. The misdemeanor Domestic Violence charge. The prosecution argued that he surely didnt forget that he had this prohibition there. He shouldve understood when he was filling out the forum and signing at the bottom saying that everything was correct there, that he was in fact prohibited from buying a gun. But he was convicted of perjury. And sentenced to three years in jail. Gassed the not the type of people. Criminals may be stupid but there are so stupid that they go to somebody whos going to do a background check when they know theyve spent two years in jail. And they are prohibited from going to do that. It would be nice if these things to be fixed, it would be easy to fix. I often told people in the guncontrol movement for 20 years, that he could pick some simple things, they could easily get these types of background checks on private transfers past. The fact that they will fight against even when i regard is very reasonable changes, indicates to me that theyre not really interested in getting this past. But they are more interested in making it difficult for lawabiding citizens to be able to go and get guns. So i want to go through 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 claims is of the United States, is unique in terms of homicide. Ill just be showing you some graphs that are in the New York Times or in a publication called light. Which of gotten a lot of attention over time. [inaudible conversation] ill try to speak loudly. Anyway, you can see here theres a set of 14 countries that they have from box where it shows homicide, about 30 per Million People in the United States, much higher than it is in other countries. Here are some things from the New York Times, where they have 11 countries and 11 developed countries with United States having about three per 100,000 people higher than italy and sweden and switzerland and other countries. There are a lot of issues with this. One of the issues is there are a lot more countries in the world. A lot more developed countries. There are like 36 countries that meet the kind of a standard score was considered developed countries. There is an arctic is an Organization Called the oecd, which is kind of the club for developed countries. Its rules based on income and production that they have. Personally i want to show you how the United States compares to all countries and then will show you with regard to all developed countries. The blue line over here, is the average per homicide rate, the green is for the median in the red is for the United States and the United States is well below the median also. Some of than half of the countries around the world have a higher homicide rate in the United States. There are a couple of to. Out here briefly. One is, a lot of people seem to think the murders and homicides are the same thing. Whether or not. And makes a difference. In these types of graphs. The big differences homicide are murders and just file justifiable homicides. Not really clear to me why you want to lump together just file justifiable homicides along with orders. They are cases where Police Officer is being threatened by a criminal and has to kill the criminal or civilian uses a gun in selfdefense. United states has a lot more justifiable homicides than other countries. That would lower our ranking rate by about 2 percent or so. For we here and would make a significant difference. Most countries dont or the vast majority of countries dont report partners, they just report homicides. That makes one difference. What people often do in the make comparisons across countries is to look at not homicides but firearm homicides and if you look at firearm homicides, the averages appear, the United States is over here much higher than the median. So why is the United States a much higher in terms of firearm homicides than we are in terms of total homicides. If you look at the graph carefully, you can see is the lines look a little thicker and there are a lot fewer names there, 45 percent of the countries in the world dont report firearm homicide data. In the countries that dont report the data are the countries that have the highest homicide rates. So the reason why we look relatively high in terms of firearm homicides is that the countries with the high homicide rates art reporting the firearm rate data. Its not that were really higher than the other countries, its just that they are removing and not providing the data for those other countries and that makes us look relatively worse. Theres no reason to believe that we are particularly high in terms of firearm homicides. If you actually had the data for all of the countries. Ill just mention that on both of these graphs, some of the really worse countries dont report the data or dont report them very accurately. Yeah places like chicago, philadelphia, which had corruption issues in terms of accurately providing crime data. Thats something that we actually see quite common in other countries. And if you just look at developed countries, you could see there are some developed countries that have much higher homicide rates than we have here in the United States. Brazil, is about six times higher than what we have here, russia is much higher, chili, the most recent years is actually more higher than what we have here in the United States. One thing its a little bit misleading in that all. Out, i think its misleading to talk about the us homicide rate. It varies so dramatically across the United States. 2 percent of the counties in the United States, account for over half of the murders. If you ever look at and they make up a little bit over the 2e population. If you look at whats called a murder map, which will graph out where the murders occur, in different counties, you will find basically within a ten block area, within those high murder counties, youre going to find over half of the murders occurring there. So they are very heavily concentrated in very tiny areas. Within the United States. Basically, its 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. It has even a worse drug gang problem. Extremely strict guncontrol laws in mexico. Since 1972, theyve only had one gun store in the country and its in mexico city. Its run by the military guns are extremely expensive. The most powerful rifles that you can go and buy a mexico, our 22 caliber. Its not what the drug gangs are using. [laughter] basically, just as the drug gangs bring in drugs from the rest of the world, they bring in weapons that they use in order to do that. So i want to talk a little bit about another number and im going to put these together. Another assumption people makes from box basically in 2007, they had about 89 guns per 100 peop people. You can see switzerland is about 46, someone. I would do this differently. The real problems with this in the source for this data is something called the Small Arms Survey. Cited in the New York Times and Washington Post all of the time. If youre interested, go look at the data, if you go through the footnotes, you find that they dont provide a source for about 85 percent of the country. Ive been asking them for five years now, can you give me your source because i am real problems with some of the data that you are having here. They basically refused. I dont believe these numbers. But it is something youre going to see all of the time in the media. There are other problems with this. For example, even the countries that they give data four. Like switzerland, but they are looking at is private ownership of guns. Switzerland at this. Would require all ablebodied males between the ages of 18 and 36 to have a military issued machine gun and in many cases, handgun in their own. Is it the ownership of guns the matter or the possession of guns that matter question mark i would think that if you are worried about people behaving responsibly or irresponsibly, with guns the position of guns should matter rather than the ownership. If you were to fix this for switzerland and for israel, which is a only a seven guns per 100 people, is israel 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. Will howdy count that. They ignored this. If you were to fix that, both switzerland and israel, in terms of position rates, are higher than what we have here in the United States. You get similar types of claims here and so for example where the claims youll see is that the United States makes up over 4 percent of the world population. The 42 percent of all civilian owned guns in the world are in the United States. There are lots of problems with beyond the fact that this is based on this nonexistent data for a lot of countries. In the countries they do have data for, they will rely in the survey. Let me give you an example of the problems with the surveys. Canada, for example if you look at surveys of long gun ownership in the early 1990s, or the mid 1990s, the find eight and a half million canadians on surveys would say they own long guns. But when they started the long gun registry, in the late 90s, all of a sudden, the surveys can only find about three and half million and aliens. That would say they own on guns. [laughter] it could be that you had about 5 million canadians that sold their guns instantly. Or you had them destroy the guns but you would imagine if you had 5 million canadians that were all of a sudden selling off the guns, it wouldve been noticed by the media a little bit. The gun stores might have noticed people masse trying to turn in the guns. Nothing like that is talked about and fact there has been some increase in sales at that time. You can imagine that once you have registry, and you somebody calling you on the phone, asking whether or not you in a long gun, you may think its from the government or something and you may be reticent if you were breaking the law to tell them yet i a gun and i havent registered it on im behaving illegally here. The real reason to believe that this number is pretty worthless for multiple reasons. Its tremendously exaggerates the us share there. Lets put these numbers together. On the one thing, ive talked about homicide rates, or firearm homicide rates across the country, ive also talked about gun ownership rates. One of the thing about gun ownership rates, what you really want to do is not look at number of guns per 100 people, i would argue you would want to look at the percentage of the population. That instance. I could have 1 percent of the population owned 100 guns each or i can have a hundred percent of the population owned one gun each and if im talking about issues of selfdefense, or people behaving improperly, it seems like knowing the percent of the population with guns is a lot more useful number. The going in looking at guns per 100 people. But they use the number of guns for people. You get this kind of grafton. It shows gun ownership here and gun related deaths here and the odd relationship with United States being way out there all by itself. Here is just own graph showing homicide rates, and this measure of gun ownership. Im only including some of the developed countries. Not including russia or brazil here. Ill show you what happens when you change the graph. Thats a we were to ask a question. The question is looking the United States learn from other developed countries excluding some of the ones with really high homicide rates like russia and brazil. If you missed that question, we find is the fact that the countries with this measure of homicide with in governorship with eye problems with, you see these graphs in the near New York Times a place like that, i just kind of want to let you know how sensitive the results are. Youll find that in fact, looking at all nine us countries, there is a negative relationship the more guns are associated with a slightly lower homicide rate and you would have gotten previously. Now if you add in these high homicide countries like brazil and russia it makes it even more negative. Even if you include the United States and there. The thing is, with the United States is totally way out here by itself. Again i am using their low numbers for guns for switzerland and for israel over here. The United States all by itself, holds up the line. If you were to fix this in israel those two countries would be way out here they will pull the line right back down by themselves. I just want you to know kind of once and how sensitive these results are and how it just depends on one observation in their excluding some of the other observations that are there. So if you were to go and look at all countries, not just developed countries, youll find the countries that have the most guns, have the lowest homicide rates. You can look at it for firearm homicide again, you find that countries with the most gun ownership has the lowest homicide rates. We see this also in terms of mass public shootings. Declining. This is from the New York Times, they publish the same graph a couple of different times. They will go and use the gun ownership rate numbers from the Small Arms Survey and the use the mass public shooting rate from somebody called Adam Langford at the university of alabama in the show this type of pods of relationships. A couple of problems with this, one, when langford, start putting out these numbers and when the New York Times was using it, he wouldnt give out the list of mass public shootings were in the world. He claimed that from 1966 through 2012, 31 percent of all the mass public shooters in the United States or in the world were from the United States. 202 from the rest of the world over those 47 years and 90 from the United States. That got massive coverage. President obama was constantly siding these claims during his administration and he claimed the United States was unique in terms of best like shootings. Way out there. So anyway, i would asking for the data, gun control advocates to asking for his list of mass public shootings around the world. He refused to commit out for years. So finally, a couple of years ago, i decided to bite the bullet and the crime Prevention Research center, you can find our list of the cases from around the world that act crime research. Org. We bit the bullet and spend about 70000. I dont know how to find cases where four people are shot in africa, or parts of south america in the 1960s. On the 1970s. He never explained how he could get a complete list of all of these cases from the 1960s in the 1970s. I just looked and we just looked in the last 15 years of the period of the 47 years where he looked at. Rather than the 202 shooters over the whole outside world outside the United States, there were 47 years, we found over 3000 in just the last 15 years. So rather than using the exact same definition that he had in his paper, so rather than the United States making up 31 percent of the mass public shooters, we found that they made up about 1 percent, actually los than 1 percent of the mass public shooters. So we make of about 4. 6 percent of the world population, 1 percent as the mass public shooters, we are way below the world average. There a lot of countries which you just population in europe, france, finland, norway, switzerland, russia, major countries plus lots of minor countries that have much lower rates. You can see that these are some of the quotes that obama would be making saying, i say this every time, we got one of these mass shootings, this just isnt just doesnt happen in other countries. I can show you several dozen of those. Whenever the administration would ask for the source, he would go inside the study. When this guy wasnt giving out his data. I can show you lots of comments from media people who would ask him over the years as data and he would refuse. Hes giving it out now. But it turns out he only included cases where one shooter was involved. Combine had to shooters, except for that, and also hes missing lots of even one shooter cases. So anyway, we put our list together. As you look at the number of People Killed per hundred thousand people, again ownership rate, rather than getting the positive relationship, you get this negative relationship. Countries with more guns, and fewer People Killed in mass public shootings. If you look at the rate of mass public shootings, and even removing the most extreme cases that are there. You still get a negative relationship that countries with more guns having. There are lots of other myths that are out there. Ill just mention a couple that we have quickly go through. One is, how many guns do americans own. If you look at places like the New York Times, this is from a graph in the New York Times, the going to argue the gun has been falling over time. Now about 30 percent of american households on again. The one survey that they rely on is something called General Social survey. Ill give you a story, a few years ago i got a call from a producer at abc news, they were doing a story a series of stories about the risk of guns in the home. I was talking to for about an hour and a half and towards the end of the conversation, she made the comment well, at least this will be too much of a problem in the future because fewer and fewer households are having guns. Sumac i said im not sure. Im sure youre relying on that General Social survey. And she said yeah. Did you know an abc news you have euros survey in your own survey doesnt show the drop that it shows that is basically flat over time as a percentage of the population. And she didnt believe me. I said well i can send you a copy of your own survey. So i did that. A couple of days later, abc news hamza series of stories on the evening news and on good morning america, im not lying, on 2020, about the study that they done about risk of guns in the home. All of the time when they would mention it, mentioning the fact that gun ownership is falling and that only percent of american households on it. This is abc news own results. That looks pretty flat to me. Its compared to the one that they ended up using. They didnt even mention that they had their own survey that showed very different results. To just give you an idea, there is a survey the Journal Social survey that shows the most recent survey from a lot of different sources. Abc news, General Social survey, cnn, gallup, cbs, universities, nbc, wall street journal, now ive just mentioned there are a couple of issues with this. These surveys are often done shortly after mass public shootings. So there are issues there about whether all of the news they might affect whether people will say they own a gun or not. You can go and see the year, i think you three lines here the blue, shows the percentage of people in the survey that said your household on again. The burnt orange are those who basically refused to answer the question and then the green is a portion of the burnt orange where reports to the percent that they own again. Sophia 5 percent, the refuse to answer and half of the people in the survey said their households again, then you take to have a percent and added onto to the other just to give you kind of arrange. You can see here, the one that you almost always see used in the news, the General Social survey, is a real outlier here. Look at the ones from the recent ones from the wall street journal and ac news, they have 46 and 47 percent of the population that say they own guns. If you adjust it as i was saying, basically pretty close to half of households say they own a gun. There are reasons for believing that this even underestimates it. I just give you one out of many reasons. Married women, are much los likely to say a gun is owned in the home than married men are. Now it could be that the guy hamza gun and hes not telling the wife about it. I suppose thats a possibility. Or i could be the guys lie about owning guns when they dont own a gun. My guess is the opposite may be more likely to be true. But another thing is that women particularly after you have one of these mass public shootings might be reticent to go and say that again is in their home or they may just be reticent to go until people that they are how they defend their families. But theres good reasons to believe that when you adjust this, you actually will end up with more than half of the households owning a gun. So why did they pick this one low survey number that they keep on using time after time. I think the reason is why they do that is they want to make gun owners feel feel somewhat isolated. I can feel that fewer and fewer people are wanting to go and own guns over time. Ill give you one example just for the survey. If you look at illinois, you have to have a four car card to go in on again. Its a license to audit. There is been a huge increase, almost double over the last 15 years or so. At the same type of the gfs survey of illinois is showing and claiming that theres been about a 30 percent drop in gun ownership over the period of time. See you have fewer people saying they own a gun in surveys at the same time, you have this huge increase on these. Cards there. The other thing you can look at is number of concealed carry permits. In 1999, 1998 there are about 2 million concealed permit holders in the United States. There are about 18 million right now. That have concealed carry permits. Even that underestimates the increase. Back in 1998, he only had one state that was a constitutional carry state where you didnt have to have a permit to carry. Now you have 16 states. People in the states dont need to get a permit to carry that in fact, when the state no longer requires a permit, you get a permit to carry outside of your state for reciprocity. You actually see the number of permits basically level off or even fall. Even though you know the number of people who are legally caring is not. Even that change from 2 million to 18 million, really underestimates the growth that you have there. It just gives you an idea of the gun ownership rates have been changing a lot more than people might think. I just mention one other survey really quickly. This is on a different question. Whether or not teachers should be armed. If you look at all adults. Slightly more adults are against teachers being armed. 48 percent to 43 percent. If you ask people who have School Aged Kids whether teachers should be armed, the people kind of have the most skin in the game so to speak, their own kids are the ones who are at risk there, they strongly support teachers being able to own guns. About 59 percent support them to own guns. The opposition to teachers having guns, basically comes from adults that dont have kids. One of the things that we frequently hear is about the risk that people having guns. Concealed carry permits actually provide some very interesting day on this. We find is we have all of these 18 million permit holders but theyre incredibly lawabiding. If you look at firearms related violations, youre talking about people losing their concealed carry permits for any type of firearms related violation at thousands or tens of thousands of one percentage. Police are rarely convicted of firearms violations. They are convicted of firearms violations at about los than one 20th of the rate of the general population. Permit holders are convicted of firearms violations and about one tenth the rate Police Officers are. Some Police Officers are rarely convicted and permit holders are even much los rarely convicted. I can go through this number. One thing you wont frequently hear about his guns and suicides. One of the claims was what makes guns are dangerous in terms of suicide, is that theyre very successful. Income may begin committing suicide. A lot of the research that firearms suicides, if it were me, that i think the issue is and the time is generally, well look at total suicides. It is really hard if you see gun control laws if you see any change in total suicide. Even if you see a drop in firearms suicide. There are a couple things to. Out here. People pick the method of suicide that they want based on whether they want to be successful. So you have a woman who may take six sleeping pills. Probably not advisable to take six sleeping pills. They are unlikely to be really successful in committing suicide there. Over often happen if you look at issues from box, only 5 percent of the people who cut themselves or only 7 percent have poisoned, but 97 percent of firearms used in suicide, are successful. So thats a reason why we should get rid of firearms. Heres a slightly broader sect, if they tended not to report the results of all of the methods of suicides. Shotguns to the head, very successful. [laughter] [laughter] cyanide is about 98 percent successful in committing suicide. Gunshots to the head also about 98 percent, explosives, about 9f youve ever been to japan but japan, headed the problem with people going in front of trains. You get hit by a train, youre gone. [laughter] thats about 97 percent successful, jumping from a height like a branch or building, thats almost as successful. Hanging, over 93 percent successful rate there. So there are lots of ways of committing suicide which are also similar in terms of quote success rates. [laughter] in terms of committing suicide if thats what you want to try to do. Interestingly enough, there is some data that most of these other types of suicides are actually los painful than shooting yourself. Theres another thing id like to try to go through it quickly and that is just a claim about us truly that this is something that we dont we do hear about all of the time and that is a gun buyback in 1996 and 90 to 1997. The claims is that it will reduce firearm homicide by about 60 percent and had a similar drop in terms of firearms suicide. So when they did the buyback, they reduce the number of licensed guns from about 3. 2 million to about they were down, people were banned, people could. The gun ownership was clearly above before the buyback. Yet a drop in licensed guns over guns but then an increase in guns. You can imagine that this didnt have a difference in crime. What you find when you look this, so there are two Different Things here. This is for firearms suicide and this is for non firearms suicides. You can see for both firearm suicides and homicides but the death rates were falling for 15 years prior to the buyback. They continue to fall afterwards but at a slower rate. Lets say i want to take a Straight Line, a perfectly Straight Line and pass along in middle and compare the before and after averages. I could pick any. Along that Straight Line and the after average is going to be below the before average. But if i look at that perfectly Straight Line, it didnt bury it all. I would say well, the after averages below and is when everybody reports. But it seems like pretty misleading thing. If i look at the line, its perfectly straight. We like to do is say did it follow the slower rate or a faster rate after the change. Was a time some time some type of continuity there. If you find firearms suicide or firearm homicide, it actually feel more slowly after the buyback than it did before. I have five minutes. I will go through one other thing. The New York Times pushes a lot, this was in in the last couple of weeks, nicholas kristof, he had the graph that they allowed to show where car thefts are falling over time. The claim is if we can only regulate guns, likely regulate cars, we can go and save lots of lives. The show that you have seatbelts here. The first and federal regulations were written until the 1960s. Let me just show you, if we were to go back to an earlier prayer to 1920, which we have the data, automobiles death rates were falling dramatically. All over this period of time before we had any federal regulations. Companies come heated against each other in terms of shatterproof glass, steering walls seatbelts all of the seas were putting cars before hand. If you actually seem in the federal government got involved, the rate stops falling for a few years, and then when their first regulations went into effect they started calling but as a slower rate than was before. Why did the federal government involvement because the improv improved, but people do, the action they ask what the actual death rate after versus before. They fail. Why did it fall more slowly . The reason why it fell more slowly after the federal government got involved, is because when the federal government said have airbags, they just dont say have airbags. What they do is, you dont have airbags, they will be designed in exactly this way, theyll be installed in exactly this way. They micromanage exactly how the company has to do it. So lets see your General Motors and ford, and you want to go and put airbags in your car. What if you were to put them in before the government tells you how youre supposed to do that, you can put maybe billions of dollars of investment into figuring out how you would design it. Then what happens if a year or two after youve done this, the federal government comes out with their own regulations and theyre telling you that there airbags have to be designed differently, they have to be in stalled differently, they may use different chemicals or whatever. We have to do. You have to rip out all of that investment the you have there, and put in a bunch of new money to go in and have it made the exact specifications the defender might government has. With that hanging over your head, what is that due two 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 guess what, the federal government isnt really fast. [laughter] youll all be shocked, you probably never happen with government regulations or anything else in the past. So it actually slows down the rate of safety improvement. People dont see that, because there always just comparing the before and after averages that are there. If you see in terms of the rate decline, it actually slowed down a lot. There are lots of other things that could go through here but what i would suggest is you got our website at crime research. Org. Go through this and many other types of myths that exist there on guns and crime. I also suggest, i dont know if an email as god pass out here. If you go to our website after about 30 seconds, a little popup will occur there and you can subscribe to our email list. Every couple weeks, the crime Prevention Research center, a group of academics around the country do research on these questions, will have kind of the current topics that are there. How many people subscribe to our email list question wrong a few people. [laughter] do you like it . You find useful . Okay he is shaking his head yes. [laughter] we both are. Anyway i think you find useful there were basically a group of academics from Harvard University of Chicago University of michigan, william and mary, other places. We do research on these things and we try to make sure that people are educated along the lines that ive been talking about so far. Ill be going back to our booth. If you like to go back there and talk more be happy to talk to you afterwards. Crime research. Org. If the words crime and research and. Org g. [applause] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] heres a look at our live coverage coverage on thursday. American Political Association takes a look at the supreme courts most recent term. When to expect when the next term begins in october. Thats followed later in the day by the discussion on the trump administration. In the state of american democracy. On cspan two in the morning, the us China Business council, presents results of a recent survey. The Business Climate in china, the impact of trade tensions with the us. Then at 3 00 p. M. Eastern, the Center Forest strategic and International Studies outlines a new report on irregular migration including refugees, immigrants mumbling. The new cspan on mysore now has put tv products. Go to cspan stork. Org to check them out. She was new for book tv and all the cspan products. The university of shankar chicago. 1919. This is about 50 minutes. Hello than everyone. Welcome to to the 35th annual presented by the near south planning council. Want to give a special thank you to all