Judging Freedom - Would Gun Control Work_

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

A conversation with John Lott#Secondamendment #guncontrolSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, May 31st, 2022. My guest is the foremost defender of the Second Amendment rights, the foremost defender of the right to keep and bear arms, and the foremost explainer of how the left uses and abuses statistics to mislead when it comes to your rights. John Lott. Dr. John Lott is a longtime gatherer and analyzer of statistics. His books are bestsellers. His great work is More Guns, Less Crime. His son Maxim used to work with me at Fox. I'm a big fan of John Lott, and if you don't know him, you'll be a big fan of him by the time we finish this interview. John, Dr. Lott, it's always a pleasure. Welcome to Judging Freedom.

It's great to talk to you again. It's been a while. Yes, thank you. So tell us in a nutshell, and again, the people watching and listening to us now are, for the most part, serious believers in the right to keep and bear arms. Tell us in a nutshell why the two tragedies, the one in Buffalo, New York, and the other in Uvalde, Texas, would not have been affected at all by the type of legislation that Joe Biden and the Democrats are now pushing. Look, the one thing I agree with Biden on from his speech a week ago was that we should do something. And I've been arguing for 20 years we should do something. But as you're indicating, let's do something that actually matters. You know, things like these background checks on the private transfers of guns.

I wish someone would point to one mass public shooting this century that would have been stopped if there had been a federal, you know, universal background check bill. And it had been perfectly enforced because there's not one of them that would have been stopped. And yet that's often the go-to first solution that Democrats and others, you know, Biden and Obama, have gone to after you've had these mass public shootings. You know, if you read the manifesto for the Buffalo murderer, what he talks about, spends a lot of time on is what is his ideal place to go and attack? And what he viewed as his ideal place is in an area where civilians were banned from being able to go and have guns. These killers, they may be crazy in some sense, but they're not stupid. Their goal is to try to kill as many people as possible. They know explicitly that the more people they kill or harm, the more media attention

that they're going to get. You have these guys knowing that they're going to go and commit suicide often, but they want to go out in a way that people will know who they are. You know, this shooting in Texas, 30% of the schools in Texas have armed teachers and staff. Unfortunately, the Robb Elementary School was one of those schools that don't allow it. 20 states, including Texas, have armed teachers and staff at schools. Let me stop you right here. In the 30% of school districts in Texas that arm teachers and staff, how many shootings have they had there? There's zero, where anybody's been harmed in any way, either killed or injured. And that's true for all the schools in the country that have teachers and staff care. And we looked at all discharges of firearms

on any school campus from 2000 on. Okay. And there's a number of them that have occurred. If you include all discharges, you're talking about 471, but that includes anything from an accidental discharge by a police officer to a suicide at 2 a.m. in the morning, which are a lot of those cases. But you cannot find any attack of any size where anybody's been killed or injured at one of those thousands of schools that have teachers and staff carrying. All the attacks have occurred in schools where they're not allowed to carry. So when the government is stupid enough, insane enough, to put a sign in front of a school saying you're in a gun-free school zone, it's an invitation to these crazies to come in.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Same thing in a supermarket with one entrance and one exit in a state where the citizenry, like New York, has been disarmed. Right, yeah. Look, it's a magnet for these attacks because these killers know that they go to a place, just read the manifesto for the Buffalo guy, and he's not alone. On our website at crimeresearch.org, I I have to read the diaries and statements and manifestos that these killers lead. And time after time, these guys talk about what their ideal venues for attack would be and how it helps them do it if the victims can't defend themselves. You know, a lot of gun control people will say, well, you know, in the grocery store shooter, there was an armed guard that was there.

But people don't understand. Okay, the killer there cased the grocery store. He knew that there was one uniformed armed guard. But if you have one uniformed guard there and you believe that he's the only person with a gun, who do you attack first? Because you know, if you take out that one person, you will have free reign to go after the other people in the store or in the school that's there. And having one uniform guard at a place, whether it's a regular guard or a police officer, they have an extremely difficult task because, you know, it's very difficult to be on guard, you know, constantly, day after day, week after week, month after month. You don't have eyes in the back of your head, okay?

If you're the only person there with a gun, you don't have multiple guards there. The attacker there has a huge tactical advantage. They can either go and wait for the guard to leave, if it's a guard that moves between places, or they can go to another target themselves, or they can take that person out. Which is what happened in Buffalo. Right, exactly. Take us bigger picture. If I'm not mistaken, your magnum opus, More Guns, Less Crime, is now in its third edition. Take us bigger picture to society at large, why more guns is less crime. number of places around the world that have banned either all guns or all handguns. You would think if on net, private ownership of guns is a bad thing, that it increases deaths, then it should be very easy to go and say, well, you know, Chicago banned handguns, or DC banned handguns, or Jamaica banned guns, or the UK banned handguns that had other restrictions, or Northern Ireland

had a gun ban. And you should be able to go and see increases in murder rates and violent crime afterwards. And yet, not one single time in any of the places that have banned all guns or all handguns has murder rates and homicide rates gone down. Not one time has it even stayed the same. Every single time that there's a ban, you see an increase, often very dramatic, large increases in homicide and murder rates. And there's a simple reason for that. And this not just applies to bans. It applies to gun control

rules generally. And that is, if you pass a law that primarily disarms law-abiding good citizens relative to criminals, you may take a few guns away from criminals, but you primarily disarm the law-abiding and make it relatively easier for criminals to go and commit crimes. I want you to address what a lot of my lefty friends have raised to me, and that's the fear of a place like New York City becoming like the Wild West if everybody's allowed to carry a gun. Obviously, I agree fully with what you're saying. To me, I'm in the Scalia school in D.C. versus Heller. The right to keep and bear arms is the modern iteration of the ancient right to self-defense. It's a fundamental human right. It doesn't come from the government. It's as fundamental to you as your right to think and the color of your eyes. But a lot of my friends are saying, well, if everybody has a gun, then Sixth Avenue will look like Dodge, Kansas.

Okay. Well, all I can say, Andrew, is that that is the exact same argument you've seen in every state that's adopted right to carry laws. In every state that's adopted constitutional carry. You see that over and over again. But what you see is that whatever gnashing of teeth there was when these states passed these laws to begin with, within six months or a year, you'll see news articles that say, you know, none of the fears that we thought were going to happen have occurred. And it becomes a non-issue. You know, here's one way to think aboutue. Here's one way to think about it. There's not one state that's passed a right to carry law or a constitutional carry law that's even had a hearing, let alone a debate,

let alone a floor vote on undoing right to carry or constitutional carry. Not one of them has tried to go back to a May issue type law. You would think that if there were problems, there'd surely be bills being put up and there surely would be hearings and some votes someplace. Cause you've had political control of state legislatures and governorships change hands over the last 30 or 40 years that states have had these types of laws. And yet there's never been a vote on undoing these laws. And I

think that tells you a lot about what's going on. These are legislators who represent the areas. And if they thought they could get support for doing it, if it wasn't just such a non-issue, as I say. But, you know, beyond that, you've had major cities, you know, Dallas and Houston and Miami and Atlanta and Philadelphia and places like that, but they're not, there's no pressure. There's no argument for going and undoing the right to carry laws that are in those places. Shortly after the tragedy in Uvalde when Governor Abbott was making a lot of inaccurate statements, I don't believe he was lying. I think he was given inaccurate data by police who were trying to cover up their own failures,

their failure of nerve and their failure to do their jobs. As he was leaving the gathering, Senator Ted Cruz was asked by a reporter for Sky News with a very elegant British accent, "'Senator, tell us why these mass shootings "'only happen in the United States.'" And Senator Cruz, Princeton undergrad, Harvard Law School, clerk for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, pro-gun, he couldn't answer it.

He kept changing the topic and he kept attacking Sky News. If John Lott had been asked, tell us why these mass shootings only happen in the United States, how would you have answered it? It's not true. I mean, there are lots of countries in the world, lots of countries in Europe, which have higher death rates per capita for mass public shootings than the United States. They have higher death rates from school shootings than the United States has. You know, you have to take into account the fact that the United States has 330 million people in it. You have countries like Finland, you know, which have a few million people in it, or Norway, which may have 5 million people in it, or Germany, which is the largest country in Europe, which has 80 million people in it. So, you know, since 2000, I can name you three significant mass public school shootings that occurred in Germany. There's one where 18 people were killed, another one where 15 people were for murder.

You know, do those get news coverage in the United States? They may get one brief news story. You've had lots of school shootings in Russia. You've had school shootings in Finland, for example. And, you know, it's not something that you can ignore, but it's just, there are a lot, you know, if I were just to compare Europe versus the United States, you know where the worst mass public shooting has been over the last couple of decades? Where? It's been in France. It was in Paris in 2015. You had 130 people killed at the concert shooting. Do you know where the second worst mass public shooting was?

It was in Norway a decade ago, where 67 people were murdered by guns, ignoring the bombing deaths that had occurred there. And, you know, I've gotten calls from people in Germany, for example, that asked similar questions after a school shooting in the United States. And I'd say, well, you know, at the time, I'd say, well, you know, two of the four worst K-12 school shootings, you know where they have been? They've been in your country. You know, just comparing Europe and the United States. Well, we have a media which is so monolithic on this, it won't focus on the truth. It just focuses on what skewed statistics they think

can help them beat the drums for taking the right to self-defense away from everybody else. Are you fearful that Congress might do something stupid just because Republicans are afraid of negative publicity, or you think that they'll stand firm and recognize that the reason these killings happened is because the public was disarmed? You know, it's above my pay grade to figure out what politicians are going to be doing on this stuff. I guess I'm always concerned. There's a reason why they push for these types of new laws immediately after these tragedies before people have a chance to really talk about it. One thing that's very different now than a decade ago or two decades ago is that the media, you know, CNN or MSNBC would have me on to go, you know, at least to be three panelists to one or four panelists to one or whatever. But at least I could go and make some of the points that I'm making about gun-free zones

or about how things are in other countries or what have you. Nowadays, there's like no desire to have any balance at all on these discussions. And even Fox, I've been very disappointed with a lot of their recent coverage that they've had. John, I've known you for, we've known each other for years. You are fearless and you are intellectual, honesty personified, and you're always welcome here. Thank you. I know you're busy and so are we. Thank you very much for your time today. My dear friend, Dr. John Lott, who defends the second amendment like no one else. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.