Judging Freedom - Second Amendment & Faulty FBI Data, John Lott

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

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Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, November 7th, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, November 7th, 2022. It's about 2.50 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. My guest today is a longtime friend and colleague who's at work I admire very, very much, John Lott. Professor John Lott is an economist, a world-recognized expert on guns and crime, and is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He's taught at major

universities. He advised the Justice Department. He's really the go-to person on the relationship between guns and crimes, and his statistical analyses will blow you away, as you'll find out in just a few minutes, because they defy what the government has been telling us. John, it's always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. It's great to talk to you. Thank you. The FBI recently released data, which you have argued in a brilliant piece in Real Clear Politics, that its data is faulty and it obscures the successful defensive gun use, so that the FBI is attempting by using very faulty data, you'll tell us in a minute just how faulty, to make the argument that the idea that a bystander with a gun, that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.

So first tell us what the FBI concluded and then tell us how they got there. And then you and I will talk about all the data and information they innocently or intentionally overlooked. Right. Well, this stems from work that I was doing while I was at the Department of Justice up until January last year. The FBI puts out what they call active shooting reports. These are instances where guns fired in public, not part of some other type of crime like a robbery or a gang fight over drug turf. It includes anything from a gun being fired at just one person and missing, all the way up to a mass public shooting. They claim over the eight years from 2014 to 2021 that there were 252 of those active shooting cases in the United States, and that 11 of those,

or about 4%, were stopped by armed civilians. Police don't collect this data. And so what the FBI has done is that they've paid a total of about $66.9 million to do this and some other things to a group of academics down at Texas State University to go and do new searches for these cases. And when I was at the Department of Justice or even before that, I've gone to the FBI. I pointed out that they've been missing cases here. And unfortunately, we live in a world right now where even when you get them to admit that they've missed a case, they won't fix it. And what I think when we've gone through and looked at this, and we haven't spent the millions of dollars that these people at Texas State University spent. We spent literally just some thousands of dollars.

So I make no claim that I found all the cases. But we say that there's about 360 of these active shooting cases as compared to their 252. And rather than 11 being stopped by armed civilians, I would argue it's at least 124. So virtually all the cases that they missed are instances where an armed civilian stopped the attack. And there's also five cases that they misclassified, that civilians stopped them, but they said that we're not going to count those as civilians because we're going to say that armed security guards stopped them. So, for example, you have the church shooting near Fort Worth, Texas in December 2019, where a man came into a church, fired his shotgun, killed two people, and then parishioners fired at

him and stopped him. While I was at the Department of Justice, I actually interviewed the individual who stopped the attack there. And he said, look, the minister just says, look, if you have a concealed carry permit, we just automatically make you an honorary security guard. You don't get paid. You don't need to tell us. They don't even know how many people were carrying that day. The man I talked to said he guessed it was someplace between 18 and 20 parishioners were actually carrying concealed handguns at the time of the attack. So the guy picked the wrong church to go after, for sure. But he said, you know, we're just, nobody keeps track of it. If you have a-

So the FBI counted these people as security guards rather than as armed citizenry. That's right. Why does the FBI do this? I mean, you remember Mark Twain, there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics. So why is the FBI jiggering with statistics? Do they have a political bias against an armed citizenry?

I guess they do because they're armed, so they don't want anybody else to be armed. Right. Look, I've worked in the federal government in the 1980s, and I worked in the federal government, as you say, at the end of the Trump administration. When I worked in the 80s, the civil service was overwhelmingly Democrats. But if you pointed out errors to them and the data, they would fix them. I can't get into people's minds exactly why they're doing what they're doing. But what I can say is that while I was at the Department of Justice, I ran into many examples of bias that was there that really indicated to me clear political bias. I can give you one more story that's related to gun stuff that I did.

So one of the tasks I wanted to do when I went to the Department of Justice was to look at the errors in the NICS background check system for people purchasing guns. Biden and other Democrats will say that there's 3.8 million dangerous prohibited people that have been stopped from buying guns because of background checks. That's simply false. What they should say is there have been 3.8 million initial denials, and about 99% of those are mistakes. It's one thing to stop a felon from buying a gun. It's another thing to stop somebody simply because they have a roughly phonetically similar name and similar birthday to somebody. So when you fill out the 4473 form to buy a gun, you put down your name, your address, your social security number, your birthday, your race, your sex, your eye color. You think they're using all that information, but in the vast

majority of checks, they're only using roughly phonetically similar names and similar birthdays. And what I wanted to get at when I went to the Department of Justice is how the error rate affects minority males. From what I've seen, the error rate for Black and Hispanic males is really, really high. And there's a simple reason for that. And that's people tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups. Hispanics have names similar to other Hispanics. Blacks tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups. Hispanics have names similar to other Hispanics. Blacks tend to have names similar to other blacks. 33% of black males have felony backgrounds that ban them from owning a gun. Well, whose names are their names most likely

to be confused with? Other black males. Hispanics, 18% of Hispanic males have felony backgrounds. For whites, it's about 6%. For Asians, it's about 3%. So it's not too surprising that you could get those errors there. So anyway, when I went to the Department of Justice, I talked to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and they thought this was an interesting project to go and look at. And so they reached out to the FBI and the FBI said that they weren't interested in looking at that type of data. And our response was, look, guys, that's not your choice. This is the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It's their job to get the data from you. You have to give it to us. And then they started arguing with us saying they couldn't see any reason why anybody would want to break down data by race and sex.

And my response was, you guys break down everything by race and sex. Why should this be any different? So we argued back and forth for a few weeks or so, and then they disappeared. You have to understand this was during COVID. It's not like you could go up to somebody's door and bang on it and get them to respond. You just send emails or leave phone messages and it disappears into the ether. Anyway, about a month later, two days after the election, they get back to us and they say, well, you guys are going to have to fill out a FOIA request. This is one part of the Department of Justice.

Right, right. Demanding a FOIA request from another part. Right. That is a new one on me. I thought I was familiar with all the bureaucraties. Let me ask you. I'm just almost done. Go ahead. And so anyway, but it was worse than that because they said, even if you could fill out the form today, there's no way that we're going to be able to finish taking care of this until after January 20th.

And we're sure that there's no way that the Biden administration is going to be interested in this. Anyway, it goes on. But they just basically played rope-a-dope. And even after Attorney General Bill Barr basically ordered them to work with us on this stuff, they would give us data that was faulty. We'd go back. They'd apologize. They'd give us more data that was faulty. They'd go back and apologize. And they kept on delaying until after January 20th, when the new Biden people killed what we were trying to look at. All right. Before I start asking you for your big picture conclusions on this, how can the FBI base whatever it does, whatever it does claim, even with statistics that it knows are faulty? I mean, stated differently, there are many states,

Gary, put the chart up. This is one of your charts. There are many states where so few police departments, state of Delaware, which has 82 police departments, zero reported. Pennsylvania, 1,500 police departments, zero reported. My home state of New Jersey, 578 police departments, 74 reported. California, 740 police departments, 13 reported. Why is that that so few report? And how can the FBI claim that whatever statistical analysis they produce can bear any earmarks of accuracy when there's so many holes in it? You could take the chart down, Gary. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't really do much of anything. And the question is, a lot of these police departments have the data. They just aren't giving it to the FBI. So like New York City and Los Angeles, you have Comstat. You can go and look it up by week, the crimes by different types of categories. They could go and turn that over to the FBI. There's no difficulty. But New York City and Los Angeles, the two largest cities in the country, aren't turning their data in as well as, as you say, almost 40% of police departments nationwide. And just from looking

through it, my guess is a lot of the ones that are tending not to report it are the ones that had the worst crime problems in 2021. Okay. So the FBI knows it has incomplete data. Right. It knows it is skewing the figure by counting a legally armed citizen as a security guard, because the minister once said, we consider y'all to be security guards if you're carrying a gun and you're in a church. It knows that it has huge gaps in those figures. It still comes up with its conclusions. Its conclusions claim that good guys stopping bad guys with guns are so few and far between, it's not even a meritorious argument. So they're perpetrating a fraud on us. Big question, John, why? But I'm a data guy. I can't get into people's minds about why they're

doing it. But here's the bottom line. You're also a philosopher and a scholar, and you've been up to here with this stuff your entire career. Right. Do I think they're problems? Yeah, but I can't prove. It could just be 100% in confidence. What bothers me the most is that even when they're told that they're errors, they don't fix them. Even when I've gotten it in writing that they admit that they missed a case, they don't fix it. But just so just summarize. So they say 4% of active shooting cases are stopped. I say it's 34% over the full eight years. But even that underestimates it because I'm more confident about the most recent years of data. If you look at 2021, 49% of active shooting cases were stopped by armed civilians versus

four. But it's even worse than that. And that is one of the things I argued when I was at the Department of Justice is you guys have to separate out gun-free zones where law-abiding citizens are banned from having guns versus ones where they're allowed, you can't expect them to go and stop attacks where it's illegal for them to have a gun. And if 2020- One of the cases you wrote about fascinated me because it seemed to be right on point, and that is a madman who it appeared was about to begin a mass killing at a shopping mall in Indiana when a young 22-year-old young fellow lawfully carrying a weapon turned around and took him out. What does the FBI say about that? That is the paradigm of why, aside from shooting tyrants when they take over the government, the paradigm of why

we have the right to keep marijuana because the cops can't be everywhere all the time. Sure. Right. Well, they haven't released the data for 2022 yet. My guess is they'll be forced to include that case simply because it got so much news attention. But what I think that case illustrates is just the bias in the media. So for example, within a day or two, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, hundreds of other news outlets had news stories that say, you know, this guy just stopped this, but we want you to know how incredibly rare it is. And they cited the data from the Texas State University people and the FBI. I wrote people at the Washington Post and at the Associated Press. The Associated Press guy came back to me and I said, look, here's my report that I did at the Department of Justice.

Here's our report that we've done afterwards. You don't need to take my word for it. Here are all the cases. Here are links to the underlying news stories, so you can check it yourself. And he didn't, they won't fix it. I talked to the Associated Press reporter afterwards, and he said that there was no reason to fix it because he had accurately reported what the FBI and Texas State University reports had et cetera. My point was their reports are an error. And again, you should look, I thought that news people would be interested if the government was putting out very faulty studies that were off by a factor of 11. Don't you think it's a news story? They're not when it goes against their agenda. And the same with the FBI. One of my viewers writes in, and this is true. Problem number one is deception and error by the FBI.

Problem number two, I think you said they spent $69 million. That's not their money. That's taxpayer dollars to deceive us. So they are paying money to support an agenda, which they embraced before they got the statistics to justify the agenda. Am I right? Yeah, unfortunately, I think that happens a lot where the federal government gives money to people that go and essentially lobby for the federal government to go and do what they want them to do. The problem is, is that the people who give out the federal money can't divorce politics from the money that they go and give out. They know the people that basically agree with them. And that's the people they give it out to. If I was in charge, I wouldn't be giving out any of this federal money. Right now, the Democrats in

Congress have put aside another $50 million this year for gun control research that's there by public health. You can imagine what those statistics will purportedly show. Of course, if I were in charge, I wouldn't even be an FBI. John, you're doing the work of the angels. If anyone wants to read John's greatest work, and there are many of his works that I would characterize as great, it's more guns, less crime. It's the standard for those of us who believe that the right to keep and bear arms is a natural right and enhances the safety of everybody around those who are lawfully carrying the guns. John Lott, I had the pleasure to work with your son Maxim for many years at Fox. You and I became good friends.

Maxim and I are friends. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for being there, Judge. Maybe another time we can talk about the abortion stuff. Oh, yes. Okay. Before we go, and I appreciate you reminding me of that. When the Dobbs decision was leaked, Justice Alito's draft opinion leaked by fill in the blank. We don't know. Somebody who wanted to keep the weak link in the majority. Somebody wanted to terrify the weak link off

the majority. We all know who the weak link was. There's Somebody wanted to terrify the weak link off the majority. We all know who the weak link was. There's no sense in focusing on him because the opinion came out six to three, and maybe there was more than one weak link. Since that Dobbs decision, where has the violence been in the abortion movement? Has it been against the pro-choice crowd or against the pro-lifers? Right. Well, I mean, what got me interested in this was all the media over the summer talking about all the violence occurring after that against pro-choice. The strange thing when I read the news articles is they didn't actually provide examples of those cases. The examples that they provided were from years earlier. So we reached out to the pro-choice people that were putting out these press releases.

They wouldn't provide us with a list. We reached out to the reporters that wrote on it. They had never seen a list. They hadn't asked apparently for a list. The Department of Justice does keep a list of violence or attacks against pro-choice. They don't keep a list of attacks against pro-life. They have one case in July. Say that again. The Department of Justice keeps a list of attacks, property or violence against pro-choice, pro-abortion, but they don't keep a list. They don't file any charges against attacks against pro-life. Unbelievable.

And they've been bringing a number of criminal cases against people in violence against pro-choice. So what we tried to do was to go and count the cases. We spent a lot of time going time doing new searches. We used the Department of Justice list. Since the beginning of May, there have been six attacks. Basically, there are things like putting super glue and Planned Parenthood locks against pro-life. But at the same time, there was 135 attacks against pro-life people or facilities. That's more than 22 times more. And again, we're having to rely on news stories. And from going through this, because there's no national news stories that occur on attacks on pro-life,

national news stories are only on attacks on pro-cho. National news stories are only on attacks on pro-choice. If you believe that maybe the media is less likely to cover attacks on pro-life than pro-choice, then even that 22 to 1 ratio may understate the size of the imbalance that's there. But you would never know from reading the media over the summer that there was more attacks on pro-life, let alone 22 times more attacks on pro-life than pro-choice. Wow. Like I said, you're doing the work of the angels. Thank you, John. John Lott, always a pleasure.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.