Variety like wharton business school, stanford, yale but i will talk about the impressions people have about guns and crime. Normally i would show you lots of graphs but im stymied on that with a technical issue but theres a lot of issues we can talk about. So just off the top of my head what we frequently hear about is that background checks and three. 5 million dangers for him people from gun. Everybody was to try to stop criminals or other people who might be dangerous from getting a gun. The problem is simply that isnt correct. Rather than saying three. 5 Million People have been stopped but what they should actually say is that there have been three and a half million initial denials. Almost all of those are mistakes. Its one thing to stop somebody its another just because they have a name that is similar to a felon. So for example the last full annual report put out on the background check system you had 76000 initial denials. Only 48 cases referred to prosecution and they got 13 convictions. Often you will hear they are not enforcing the law but that same tiny radar prosecutions was is true under bush and obama and republicans attacked democrats for not enforcing the law. But if you talk to the people involved in these agencies they would love to enforce them. But just because somebody has a similar name that you will not do Enforcement Actions against them. You put down your name and Social Security number your race and i color you give them all that information you think they are using all that information but what they use roughly fanatical similar names and birthdays. I can give you cases people have similar names have been stopped from being able to buy a gun. The problem is the most Vulnerable People in society have been harmed as a result. Primarily minorities as a result of this process. People tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups. Blacks have names to 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 are their names most likely to be confused with . Other lawabiding good black males who want to defend themselves and their families. But it cost money most people will find it necessary and to hire a lawyer to help them it could cost 3000 or 10000 in order to go through the Legal Process with something thats no fault of their own. So now minorities are overwhelmingly being stopped so my research of it convinces me of anything they are most likely to be victims of violent crime. And then to protect them. But police themselves that they arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred and that raises questions about what people should do. And questions what they do and its easy to fix this problem. Theres no reason why. They do background checks on employees all the time. If they had an error rate that was 100 than they would be sued out of existence. If you want to push those background checks ask why it is we dont have the same standards for doing criminal background checks since the federal government demands private companies have to make for that uses roughly phonetically similar names they would be screaming bloodied murder that would result the discrimination against minorities. Lies that good enough for private companies . Why not require the government has to do the same thing but if you bring this up to gun control advocates they will scream poison pill instead of just defeating the measure though reason they fight so hard is because its a lot better to say three. 5 million dangers or prohibited people stopped than to say 35000. Even looking at those number numbers, these are not dangerous criminals but those who didnt realize they made a mistake. I will give you an example. There is a man who is 65 and who got threatened her job she was going to get a concealed carry permit so he decided as a gift he would buy her a handgun and he went into a store filled out the paperwork. It turns out 43 years earlier he had got into a fist fight with his brother and the neighbors called the police. He was arrested and he pleaded guilty to Domestic Violence misdemeanor. That is a prohibited thing. The prosecution argued surely he did not forget he had a prohibition on that he should have understood when he was filling out the form and signing at the bottom that everything was correct that he was in fact prohibited from buying a gun but he was convicted of perjury and sentenced three years in jail. Those are not the types of people. Criminals may be stupid but theyre not so stupid that they go to somebody who does a background check when they know they spent two years in jail and they are prohibited to do that. So it would be nice if these could be fixed or be easy to fix ive told people in the guncontrol movement for 20 years if they fix some simple things they could easily get these background checks past but the fact they fight against it of these reasonable changes indicates to me they are not really interested to get it passed. More interested just to make it difficult for lawabiding citizens to get guns. I want to go through the common claims. One of the most common claims is that it is unique and i will show you some graphs from the New York Times which have gotten a lot of attention over time. I will try to speak loudly. Its a set of 14 countries where it shows homicide per 30 Million People in the United States. Here is something from the New York Times with 11 countries and 11 developed countries in the United States with three or 400,000 people sweden and switzerland and other countries. There are issues with this. One of the issues is there is a lot more countries in the world. A lot more developed countries. There are 36 countries that meet the standards that are considered developed countries an Organization Called the oecd which is the club for developed countries with rules based on income and production. But first of all how the United States compares to all countries and then all developed countries. The blue line is the average. The green is the median and the red is the United States. So more than half of the countries around the world have a higher homicide right rate United States. A couple things to point out people think murderers and homicides are the same thing. They are not. It makes a difference in these graphs. The big difference homicides are murderers and justifiable homicides its not clear why you would want to lump them together justifiable homicides are cases where a Police Officer is threatened by a criminal and has to kill the criminal or a civilian uses a gun in selfdefense. The United States has a lot more justifiable homicides in other countries. That would lower our rate by 20 percent from what we have and would make a significant difference. The vast majority of countries that report homicides only and that makes a difference. What people often do is not look at homicides but firearm homicides the averages over here the United States is over here the reason why its so much higher as in firearms if you look at the graph carefully what you can see is 45 percent of the countries in the world dont report firearm homicide data and those that dont are the ones that have the highest homicide rate. The reason why we look relatively high in terms of firearm homicides is the countries with the high rates are not reporting the data. So the fact we are really higher is just that they are removing and not providing the data for those other countries so that makes us were so theres no reason to believe we are particularly high in terms of firearm homicides if you actually had the data. On both of these graphs some of the worst countries dont report the data accurately. Places like chicago or philadelphia that had corruption issues to accurately provide crime data that is something that we see quite common in other countries. You can see there are some developed countries that have much higher homicide rate data that is six times higher than what we have here actually its higher than what we have here in the United States. One thing that is misleading to talk about a us homicide rate because it very so dramatically across the United States, 2 percent of the counties in the United States account for over half the murders in the United States making up 20 percent of the population. But if you look at the murder map where the murders occur in different counties you will find basically within a ten block area within the high murder counties will find over half the murders occur. So they are very heavily concentrated in very tiny areas in the United States. And basically thats drug gang related. We have a relatively high homicide murder rate because we have a large gang problem. There is extremely strict gun control anothers countries since 1972 theres only been one gun store in mexico city they are extremely expensive the most powerful rifle you can buy is a 22 caliber rifle. But thats not what the drug gangs are using. Basically just as they bring in drugs and the rest of the world they bring in weapons that they use to do that. So i will talk about another number another comparison is gun ownership rates in 2079 guns for every 100 people in with switzerland is 46 and so on. I would do that differently there are real problems. The source for the data is a Small Arms Survey if you are interested go look up the data and if you look at the footnotes they dont provide a source for 85 percent of the countries and i have been asking them for five years can you give me your source cracks because i have some problems with the data and they refuse to say where they got their data from. I dont believe these numbers but you will see it all the time in the media. There are other problems with this. So for example what they are looking at his private ownership of guns. Switzerland at this point would require all ablebodied males between the ages of 18 and 36 to have a military issued machine gun and a handgun in their home. Is at the ownership of gun or possession cracks i would think if youre worried about people behaving responsibly or irresponsibly with guns the possession should matter rather than ownership. If you want to fix this for switzerland and israel they say only seven guns per 100 people the vast majority are owned by the government. You may be in possession of a gun for four years but the government technically owns it. How do you count that cracks they ignore it so both switzerland and israel in terms of possession ray are higher than what we have here in the United States. And then was similar types of claims one of them you will see is United States makes over 4 percent of the worlds population but 42 percent of all goods in the world are in the United States. There are a lot of problems with this beyond the fact its based on nonexistent data. Even the countries they do have data for they will rely on the survey. If you look at surveys of gun ownership in the early 19 nineties you will find eight. 5 million canadians say they own long guns so when they started the registry all of a sudden the survey could only find three and a half million canadians they would say they own a long gun. Now they had 5 million canadians that sold there as recently or you had them destroyed their gun but you would imagine with 5 million canadians suddenly saying that wouldve been noticed the gun stores might have noticed people trying to turn in their guns. In fact there was some increase in sales during that time. But you can imagine if you have a registry and somebody calls you up on the phone asking if you own a long done, no you may think its from the government and you may be reticent if you are breaking the law to say yes i have a guide i have not registered it yet. There are real reasons to believe this number is false for multiple reasons it tremendously exaggerated. Put these numbers together so i have talked about homicide rates in firearm homicide rates and also gun ownership rates what you really want to do is not look at those guns per 100 people but the percentage of the population that owns guns. If we have 1 percent of the population own 100 guns each or 100 percent of the population own one gun each , talking about issues of selfdefense for people behaving improperly it seems knowing the percent is a much more useful number than looking at the number of guns per 100 people. But they use a number of guns per 100 people and then it shows gun ownership here and then therell be a relation being out there all by itself and just to show homicide rates and the measure of gun ownership. Finish what happens on the graph. But the question is what can the United States learn from other developed countries excluding those with high homicide rates like russia and brazil cracks that countries that you see the graphs in the New York Times in places like that want to let you know how sensitive the results are. Looking at all nonus countries that more guns are associate with a slightly lower homicide rate. It looks even more negative if you include the United States. But this is way out here all by itself. But over here all by yourself then these countries to be way out here. And how sensitive these results are and with one observation and looking at those that are there. And to find those countries that have the most guns have the lowest homicide rates. You can look at it for firearm homicide. And we see this also in from the New York Times published the same graph and then separates the numbers and the National Shooting rate and shows those relationships. When langford and when the New York Times was using it he would not give out the list of shootings around the world. He claimed 1966 through 2012 all of the shooters were from the United States 202 from the rest of the world. And 90 from the United States. And then to have massive coverage president obama was constantly siting these claims during his administration that the United States was unique. I would ask where the data even drug control on gunter and control they refuse to give it out for years so finally a couple years ago i decided to bite the bullet the Crime Prevention Research Center you can find the list around the website we bit the bullet and paid 70000 i dont know how to find cases were four people are shot in africa or south america in the 19 sixties or seventies. He never explained how he could get a complete list of all these cases from the 19 sixties and seventies. We just looked at the last 15 years of the. Of those 47 years he looked at and rather the 202 shooters outside the United States we found over 3000 in just the last 15 years. So rather than using the exact same definition in his paper for the United States making up 31 percent we found it was 1 percent and actually lasts 1 percent so about four. 6 percent of the population so we are way below the world average to adjust for population in europe and france and finland norway. Switzerland. Russia major countries that have much lower rates. These are just some of the posts or quotes obama would make sensei this doesnt happen in other countries. Whenever the administration would say when he wasnt giving out his data. I can show you the people who have asked him over the years for data and he refused he is giving it out now but only included cases where one shooter was involved. Columbine had two shooters but he also is missing one shooter cases. So we put our list together if you look at the number of People Killed with the gun ownership rate then there is a negative relationship with more guns and fewer People Killed in mass public shootings if we look at the rate of mass public shootings and to remove the most extreme cases that show a negative relationship there are a lot of other myths that are out there and one is how many guns to americans own cracks look at the New York Times that gun ownership is falling over time now 3 percent of households own a gun. What they are relying on is the job General Social service. I will give you a story a few years ago i got a call from a producer at abc news about the risk of guns in the home i was talking to them for an hour and a half and for the end of the conversation she made the comment at least this will be too much of a problem in the future because fewer and fewer households are having guns. I said you are assuming youre relying on the General Social survey cracks i said you know abc news said you have your own survey and it doesnt show the drop as flat over time as percent of population cracks she did not believe me. I said i can send you a copy of your own survey. I did that and a couple days later abc news had a series of stories on Good Morning America and nightline and 2020 about the study they had done of risk of the guns in the home all the time mentioning that gun ownership is falling only 30 percent owned it. This is abc news own results and that looks pretty flat to me compared to the one they ended up using they didnt mention they had their own survey that shows very different results so there is a General Social survey by his most recent from a lot of different sources like abc news cnn, gallup nbc, wall street journal, i just mentioned theres a couple issues. These surveys are often done shortly after mass public shooting. There are issues there the people will say they own a gun. The blue line shows their household on the gun those that were reduced to answer the question and in the green is in proportion that they own a gun whether 5 percent that refuse to answer and half the people in the survey said the household owned a gun then you take two and a half percent and add that on to the others to give you a range. The one you almost always see in the news is the outlier. Look at the recent ones from the wall street journal 4647 percent of the population is pretty close to half of households say they own a gun. There are reasons that it is underestimated. One of many reasons because married women are much less likely to say a gun is in the hall than married men. Is a possibility the man is in telling the wife or that guys lie when they dont. I think its the opposite but women after you have a public shooting are reticent to say there is a gun in the home or to tell people how they defend their family. There is good reason to believe you end up with more than half the households owning a gun. So why do they pick this one loan survey number they use time after time cracks the reason is they want to make gun owners feel isolated that fewer and fewer people want to own guns over time. So one example is look at illinois. You have to have a license. There has been a huge increase that has almost doubled over the last 13 years but at the same time the survey for illinois claims 30 percent drop of gun ownership. So fewer people say they own a gun but at the same time you have had a huge increase. Also concealed carry permits in 19,892,000,000 concealed carry permit holders in the United States there is about 18 million right now and even then that underestimates the increase because back in 1988 there is only one state that was constitutional carry we didnt have to have a permit to carry and now you have 16 states. So people in those states dont need to get a permit to carry so when the state no longer requires a permit if you get it outside your state for reciprocity you see the number of permits level off or even fall if you know the people who are legally carrying has gone up so that change from 2 million up at 18 million underestimates the growth that you had. It gives you an idea gun ownership rates have been changing a lot more than you might think. One more survey quickly. Whether or not you think teachers should be armed. If you look at all the data slightly more adults are against teachers being armed. If you ask people who have schoolage kids if teachers should be armed those that have the most skin in the game their own kids who are at risk, they strongly support teachers owning guns. 59 percent. But the opposition to teachers having guns come from adults who dont have kids. One of the things we frequently hear about people having guns is concealed carry permits asked to provide Interesting Data because we have these 18 million permit holders but they are lawabiding looking at firearms before losing the concealed carry permit for any type of firearm related violation that is ten of thousands of a percentage point. Police are rarely convicted of firearms violations they are convicted of violations less than one 20th the rate of the general population. But permit holders have violations at one tenth the rate of Police Officers. So Police Offices are rarely convicted in permit holders even much less. You will frequently hear about guns and suicide. One of the claims what makes gun so dangerous as they are successful. And a lot of the research that has been done if it was theo look at total suicides its very hard if you see gun control laws to see any change of total suicide even with a drop of firearms. People pick the method on if they want to be successful. A woman may take six sleeping pills. Thats not advisable but youre not likely to be successful. What will often happen that only 5 percent of those who cut themselves only 7 percent are poison but 97 percent of firearms used in suicide are successful so thats why we should get rid of firearms. They tend to report the results shotgun to the head is very successful. [laughter] cyanide is 98 percent. Gunshot to the head 90 percent explosives are 97 percent at if youve ever been to japan they had problems of people going in front of trains. If you get hit by a train you are gone. Thats 97 percent successful like a bridge or a building hanging is 93 percent successful rate. There are a lot of ways of committing suicide that are similar with a success rate in terms of committing suicide and what you try to do. There some data that most of these other types are actually less painful than shooting yourself. And lastly the claim about australia we hear about all the time they had a gun buyback in 1996 with the claim to reduce firearm homicide by 50 percent and a similar drop of firearm suicide. When they did the buyback to reduce the number of license guns from three. 2 at about two. 5 million they were not banned they can still buy them by 2010 the gun ownership rate was clearly above what it was before the buyback. You had a drop over time it increased so you could imagine if this really had the effect on crime there should have been an immediate drop and then an increase over time. What you find this is firearm suicide and non firearm suicide for you can see for both the death rates have been falling 15 years prior for go they continue to fall afterwards at a slower rate. If i took a perfectly Straight Line and just compare before and after averages if i pick any point along that Straight Line the average will be below the before average. But this perfectly Straight Line did not vary at all. Thats what everybody reports it seems like pretty misleading the line is perfectly straight. Do you call that a slower rate over a faster rate . Was there discontinuity . If you look at firearms suicide or homicide it was actually more slowly than the buyback. One other thing. This is something the New York Times pushes a lot from Nicholas Kristof the graph they like to show that car deaths are falling and the claim is if we can only regulate guns like we regulate cars we could save a lot of lives in those regulations but if they were to go back to an earlier. Automobile death rates for falling dramatically before we had any federal Regulation Companies compete against each other collapsible steering columns and seatbelts if you actually see when the federal government but then in a slower rate than it was before so then what they always do is to say that death ray after the lava before but that falls over time. Falls more slowly after the federal government gets involved they dont just say have airbags they say but we designed to be this way they micromanage to be General Motors or ford and you want to put airbags in your ca car, if you put them in before the government tells you how you are supposed to do that you will put billions of dollars of investment into figuring out how you would design and then what happens one or two years after you have done this cracks the federal government comes out with their own regulations and says they have to be designed differently, installed differently, different chemicals what you have to do cracks you have to rip out that investment and put new money to meet the exact specifications of federal government had. What does that do to Car Companies going out on the road to try to improve the safety of their cars . They dont do it they wait until the federal government tells them. Guess what the government isnt fast and doing things. I know you are shocked. And a half on actually slows down. People dont see that because i just compare the before and after averages. But if you see that decline it goes down a lot. There are a lot of other things i could go through that go to crime research. Org to go through this that exist on guns and crime. I dont know if the email is passed out but if you go to the website after 30 seconds a popup will occur you can subscribe to our email list. Every couple weeks the Research Center has research on these questions and will have the current topics. How many subscribe right now . A few. Youll face academics from harvard, university of chicag chicago, yuba city michigan, william and mary that do research on these things and we try to make sure people are educated along the lines i have been talking about. If you like to go back and talk more ill be happy to talk to afterwards. Crime research. Org crime research. Org. [applause] [inaudible conversations] good afternoon welcome to our seminar book talk and conversation it is a great pleasure to welcome back authors Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan the talks about russias exile to be to distinguish investigative journalist
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