Quotes from John Lott

The Small Arms Survey is the most commonly-cited source for data on gun ownership rates. It has given support to the claim that the United States has by far the highest level of gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people.

Americans have a right to be concerned with the increased frequency and severity of mass public shootings in their own country. But the fact of the matter is that the rest of the world has it worse, and is definitely not an example for the U.S. to follow. The U.S. has high gun ownership rates, and it hasn't resulted in any elevated level of mass public shootings.

Bans on large-capacity magazines are more or less exclusively obeyed by law-abiding citizens, and will prevent concealed handgun permit holders from carrying many bullets in their guns.15 Concealed handgun permit holders usually don't carry multiple guns or magazines, whereas attackers often arm themselves to the teeth. Magazine limits mean that criminals are more likely to out-gun law-abiding citizens.

The paper fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the murder weapon the gun that had been kept in the home. Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much greater than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses.

Police and security guards play an important role in stopping crime, but there uniforms put them at a disadvantage in these terrorist-type attacks. Knowing that the officer is the only person with a gun makes things quite simple for attackers. They need only kill him first. It is the equivalent of wearing a neon sign saying "shoot me first.

Jake Berry, a reporter with the Nashua Telegraph (New Hampshire), concluded after a 2013 interview with gun control researchers: "On the whole, Lott's colleagues—both in the media and academia—don't dispute his findings [on gun-free zones].

Omitted is the fact that the UK's homicide rate rose after its gun control laws were enacted.8 The UK's homicide rate is lower than the US's, but this is despite the country's counterproductive gun control laws, not because of them. The UK's homicide rate was very low before it had any gun control laws.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings (Figure 15). The New York Times came up with a slightly higher number when it analyzed mass public shootings from 1949 to 1999.46 The results confirm something that we have known for a long time — it is very difficult for psychiatric professionals to know who will actually commit mass murder.

The problem is that even top psychiatrists failed to identify them as real threats. And it's not as though psychiatrists lack incentives to get the diagnosis right. Beyond their reputation, professional pride, and desire to help, psychiatrists also have a legal obligation to inform authorities of threats. Families of the Aurora movie theater victims sued Holmes' psychiatrist for not recommending that his patient be confined.

In March 2019, immediately after the New Zealand attack, I tweeted that the shooter was "a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade."63 I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would "lead to more gun control" in New Zealand and the United States. Twitter locked my account for two months so that I couldn't post anything or even read messages from other users.

By contrast, public health researchers place these same policies near the bottom of their list. Their top policy choice — barring gun sales to people deemed dangerous by a mental health provider with just over a 6 out of 10 rating — is the fifth most valued policy by criminologists (4.88), but their other top policies aren't viewed positively by criminologists.

The entire gun control debate would likely be dramatically different if the national media would cover some of the heroic actions of permit holders.

My numbers show that at least 16.5 percent of attacks between 2014 and 2017 were stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. Back in 2015, when I pointed out errors in the first FBI report, the authors simply responded, "We acknowledge in the FBI report that our data are imperfect." But no correction was ever made.

the media had its narrative before it knew any of the facts

National media outlets such as ABC,8 CNN,9 and NBC noted that the alleged gunman told another white man: "Whites don't kill whites." It sounded as if the gunman was merely reassuring a bystander. But that bystander was a permit holder who was pointing a gun at the killer. What the killer actually said was: "Don't shoot me. I won't shoot you. Whites don't shoot whites."10 The killer was pleading with a permit holder not to shoot him.

The New York Times' pro-gun control results seem to stem from a heavy reliance on public health researchers. Furthermore, the Times only asks questions calling for more government regulations of gun ownership. But the Times' panel was even more supportive of gun control than was the average public health researcher in our survey, so it is hard to believe that there wasn't bias at work in the selection of the panel's membership.

Of those shootings, 53 occurred in the United States and 2,354 happened in the rest of the world. While the US had about 4.6 percent of the world's population during this period, it had just 2.20 percent of the mass public shootings.

Between 1950 and June 2019, 94 percent of mass public shootings in the United States occurred in places where general citizens were banned from carrying.

You hear gun control advocates say all the time "guns kill people." And you hear a lot of Second Amendment advocates say "no, people kill people." But what you have to understand, and what you will understand after reading this book, is: gun control kills people.

Semiautomatic weapons are also used to protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require reloading by hand may not do people a lot of good when they are facing multiple criminals. The first shot may also miss or fail to stop an attacker. People wanting to protect themselves and their families might not have the luxury of time to reload their guns.

Americans use guns defensively about 2 million times a year — about 5 times more frequently than guns are used to commit crimes.

In real life, crime guns are very rarely left at the scene of incidents, and the only exceptions occur when criminals have been seriously injured or killed.

Also, crime guns are very rarely registered. In the exceedingly rare instances that they are, they aren't registered to the person who committed the crime. That's why police in such diverse places as Chicago, Hawaii, DC, Pennsylvania, and Canada can't point to any crimes that have been solved as a result of registration.

police explain that the job of protecting people is their own,