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This excerpt of an interview has some great sound bites and talking points.

Bang!

Bang.

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.

Got a direct link to the interview? I didn't see it on the main page.

My only criticism of this article, or Lott's statements would be as in the following:

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.

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