The Real John Lott-Great Interview with Talking Points

By Steve Stanek - Economist turned gun rights activist talks to the Leader about new book, "The Bias against Guns"

CHICAGO -- As an economist, John Lott did not intend to become one of the nation's foremost authorities on guns and crime, but he accomplished that in 1998 with the publication of his bestselling book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press), which argues that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reduces crime.

Lott has recently come out with a new book, The Bias Against Guns (Regnery Publishing, Inc.), which shows how gun-control advocates in the news media, government and academia have dominated and distorted the guns and crime discussion. He was a featured speaker at the recent Chicago Conservative Conference and spoke with Illinoisleader.com about his new book.

Lott, 45, is currently resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has held teaching and research positions at prestigious institutions including University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford University, UCLA, the Wharton Business School and Rice University and was chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989.

Leader: I've read that you were not a gun owner before you published "More Guns, Less Crime." What made you decide to write the book?

Lott: Some years ago I was teaching a class that dealt with crime issues. I thought my students would be interested in reading some papers on gun control. I started looking for papers for them to read and was shocked at how poorly done the research was. I decided to do my own study.

More Guns, Less Crime has data on all the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. over an 18-year period. I believe it's the largest study of its kind that's ever been done.

Lott: After I had done More Guns, Less Crime, one thing that struck me when I talked to people was that they'd tell me they had never heard of defensive gun use. Another thing that struck me was how many times people would tell me that guns were too emotional of an issue, that facts simply didn't matter. I think that's wrong. I think facts do matter.

You can't pick up a newspaper in the morning or listen to local or national news reports in the evening and not hear something horrific that's happened with guns. My concern is how balanced the information is.

One thing I try to do with this book is explain why people have the view they do about guns and look at the information they receive and the impact it has on these views. I was shocked when I tried to systematically measure the coverage that's done.

Lott: If you look at the national news reports for ABC, NBC and CBS during 2001, they had about 190,000 words of gun crimes stories on their television morning and evening news reports. The average story is only 250 words or so. During that whole year there was not one single mention of people using their guns defensively, to either protect themselves or someone else.

In the New York Times, for example, they had about 51,000 words on contemporaneous gun crimes in 2001. They had only one story, of 163 words, buried way back in the newspaper, of a retired police officer who had used his gun to stop an armed robbery. My guess is the only reason they mentioned that was because it was a retired police officer.

The New York Times is not unusual in this. It's amazing how many of the top 100 newspapers in this country give almost no coverage of defensive gun use. We know most of the crimes occur in urban areas. Just 3 1/2 percent of the counties account for more than 70 percent of the murders, and that's where the vast majority of defensive gun uses occur. To the extent you see defensive gun use covered, it tends to be in smaller newspapers outside urban areas.

Lott: Part of it you can explain because of what is newsworthy. If you're an editor and you have two stories and one has a dead body on the ground and a sympathetic victim, and the other has a woman brandishing a gun at a would-be attacker who has run away with no shots fired, no crime actually committed, I think everybody would find the first story more newsworthy. The problem is that doesn't explain everything.

It's not going to explain stories that are already newsworthy, that are getting massive national and international news attention, and when somebody uses a gun to stop a crime, that part of the story is systematically left out. One-third of the public school shootings were stopped by citizens with guns before police were able to respond, yet if you look at those incidents you'll find that only about 1 percent or fewer of the news stories on those specific cases will mention that a gun was used to stop the attack.

There was a case last year that got a lot of attention, an attack at Appalachian Law School in Virginia (in which three people were killed). When the attack started, two students at the school, who had law enforcement backgrounds, ran to their cars, got their guns, came back, pointed their guns at the attacker and ordered him to drop his gun. When he did so they tackled him and held him until police arrived.

You'll find in the one week after that attack more than 200 separate news stories around the country on that incident. Only two of the stories mentioned that the students used their guns to stop the attack. The others are like the Washington Post, which said they subdued the attacker and held him until police arrived, or like the New York Daily News, which said they tackled the attacker.

I decided to call reporters and ask if they knew the facts, and if they did, why they chose to report the story the way they did. It was amazing. Reporter after reporter knew the facts. Most of them seemed to have talked to the students who used their guns to stop the attack. For instance, Maria Glod at the Washington Post talked to one of the students, Tracy Bridges, for over 10 minutes and talked to the other student almost as long.

I asked, 'Why, then, did you talk only of subduing the attacker and holding him until police arrived?' Her response was space constraints. She said she had no space to mention that guns were used to stop the attack. I would imagine in terms of newsworthiness, a gun is going to be much more grabbing than saying simply, vaguely, that someone subdued the attacker.

These are not necessarily the worst examples of the imbalanced coverage people are given. One case that bothers me a lot is the reporting on accidental gun deaths involving kids.

I was giving a talk a couple of weeks ago to a class of first-year medical students at Northwestern University. One of the questions I asked was, "How many children under 10 died from accidental gunshots in the most recent year for which we have detailed data, 1999?" The smallest estimate I got from the students was 450. Others gave numbers in the thousands.

So I told them, "You can go on the Centers for Disease Control website and look at their mortality and morbidity reports and find that in 1999 there were 31 accidental gun deaths for children under age 10." Then I asked, "What's the typical case?" They would say, "Well, it's a young child getting hold of a gun and shooting himself or another child."

But the typical case is an adult male who has a long history of arrests for violent crimes, who's either a drug addict or alcoholic, who is accidentally firing a gun. There were only six cases in the United States in 1999 where a child accidentally shot himself or another child. If you look at the numbers from 1995 to 1999, it's five to nine a year where that happens. Yet we think it's much more frequent, in part because when one of these rare cases occurs, it gets a huge amount of news coverage.

Five or nine or 31 are too many, but there needs to be some perspective. Ninety-some million Americans own guns, and there are about 40 million kids under 10. I would argue that it's hard to think of any other item that is as commonly owned and anywhere near as dangerous as guns and that has as low of an accidental death rate associated with it.

We have more kids under age five who drown in bathtubs than we have under age 15 who die from any type of accidental gunshot. We have more kids under age five who drown in five-gallon plastic water buckets than we have under age 10 who die from any type of accidental gunshot. But people don't know that.

Lott: People don't think, "Gee, that's being covered because it's such an incredibly rare event." They come away thinking, "This is an epidemic and we ought to seriously think about no longer owning guns or locking them up in some way.......................

More:

My concern is that this actually leads to more deaths rather than fewer deaths. You'll find that when you have these laws requiring people to lock up their guns and what have you, there is an increase in the total number of deaths that occur, because people are no longer able to use a gun defensively.

In the year prior to finishing my book, I found eight cases in the United States where young children had used a gun to save the life of a family member. These were fairly dramatic, heroic cases. Some of the reporters (who wrote about the incidents) had written other crime stories that were picked up by multiple newspapers, but when they wrote on these incidents, they were short stories in their own papers that did not get picked up by any other papers.

You have about as many young kids who use guns to save lives as you have these bad stories, but the bad stories get huge coverage and these other heroic stories get almost none. And my guess is there are probably more of these good cases, because there are probably many good cases that were never reported.

Leader: I want to throw something out and get your response. Do you think that the leaders of the gun-control movement know they're not going to make the nation safer or less violent, that it's really an ideological attack on people, who, for the most part, they oppose politically and philosophically? You don't find many far left liberals at the target range.

Lott: There might be some of that, but I can't believe people would fight for laws they believed would actually harm people. I think they are as affected by the news media as other people are. They hear about bad things that happen with guns and never hear about good things and so think if they can get rid of guns, they'll make the world a safer place.

They don't think about the unintended consequences of these laws. They don't think that if they pass a law and it's primarily law-abiding citizens who are disarmed, because they obey laws and criminals don't, they could have increases in crime and more harm being caused.

Leader: I've read comments by you that sometimes take the National Rifle Association to task. Why?

Lott: I do have disagreements with the NRA on some issues, but on the other hand, if they weren't there to fight these battles, we'd be in a much worse situation than we're in now. So I view this as friendly criticism.

The big thing is, it would be great if the news media provided some kind of balance. Even if only a few of the defensive gun uses got a lot of attention, that would dramatically change the debate. The problem is they don't do it, and people are being severely misinformed.

I don't know of any organization other than the NRA with the resources and abilities to rectify that problem. When they spend millions of dollars on advertising or something like that, if it were me, rather than just emphasizing the freedom issue, I would spend some of that money on short radio ads where they would have a few sentences that say, "A serial rapist broke into Mary Smith's home, and she was able to stop the attacker with a gun she owned and hold the criminal until police arrived." And then I would say something like, "Two million times a year, people use guns defensively. When was the last time you heard a story like this on the news?"

While there are some people who care about freedom for freedom's sake, my guess is that the vast majority in the middle care about whether certain rules make us safer. Unless you deal with the fact that guns have benefits and that these gun-control rules can actually create problems, you don't have much of a response.

Leader: If Mayor Daley were here, what would you say to him?

Lott: I would say to him that he seems to understand the benefits of people having a gun to protect themselves, because he has armed body guards and I think for legitimate reasons. But there are many people who live in much more dangerous areas of the city than he does, who face much greater risks than he does, who would like to be able to protect themselves, and they don't have the city paying for 24-hour body guard protection.

You look at the cab drivers. Daley has laws that require them to pick up people in dangerous areas of town, yet he won't let them defend themselves. The question Daley needs to answer is, "What does he advise these people to do? Does he think the best thing for them to do is behave passively when confronted by these criminals?"

When you look at the data, that's not the right thing to do. The data show that those who behave passively are much more likely to be injured or killed than those who have a gun to defend themselves. I would ask Daley to apply the logic that he applies to himself to other people.

John Lott's new book, The Bias Against Guns is available on Amazon.com.

I would change the word "newsworthy" to "sensational" for accuracy. Maybe "liberally biased sensationalism" would be more accurate.

I'd agree with his use of the term "newsworthy". A woman who reaches for her waistband and causes a would-be rapist to flee is no more newsworthy than someone who manages to swerve his car to avoid a collision.

Although there are many defensive gun uses which are newsworthy (e.g. woman shoots rapist), there are many more which are not newsworthy because they represent non-events. In many if not most cases, a defensive gun use will result in the would-be assailant aborting an attack before committing any provable crime. As such, there wouldn't really be anything to report.

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