Free Republic

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) claims that suppressors make mass public shootings more deadly. Between January 1, 1998 and December 31, 2024, there were 104 mass public shootings, but only two of those involved suppressors (Virginia Beach, Virginia in 2019 and Milwaukee in 2020). The average number of casualties from mass public shootings with suppressors is actually lower than the average without (11 v. 19.8), though the average number of people murdered is exactly the same as (8.5 v. 8.5). Senator Murphy also claims that suppressors will make it so that “no one will be able to hear the gun shots.”...

The Biden Justice Department, much like the Biden Labor Department, is quietly amending its crime statistics after posting incomplete data to dispute a key charge that former President Donald Trump has made against Joe Biden. For most of his third campaign for office, President Trump has regularly railed against rising violent crime in the U.S., tying high-profile instances of murder to the millions of new migrants who crossed into the country over the past two years. In response, both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have disputed his characterization of crime, and they have been assisted by a mainstream media...

The just-released data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) shows violent crime has soared under Biden-Harris. If you look at rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults (the NCVS doesn’t measure murder), between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 15% under Trump and soared by 55% under Biden between 2020 and 2023. The year before they became president and then how it had changed by the either the end of Trump’s president or the latest year for Biden-Harris. Even if you take the starting period for Biden as 2019 or the five-year average before COVID because...

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) says there’s a concerted effort by the federal government and the legacy media to “debunk” the fact that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent crime and stop mass shooters. Massie was referring to an article by Dr. John R. Lott Jr. that makes the case that the FBI, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and legacy media outlets regularly suppress and hide data that proves that an armed citizenry is one of the most effective deterrents to a mass casualty attacks. ongressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) says there’s a concerted effort by the federal government and...

A lot of people are moving out of California. Over the last two years, California has lost about 300,000 people. Major companies, including Telsa, Oracle Corp, and HP have abandoned California for Texas. With high taxes, lots of regulations, high crime, poor schools, mishandling of the pandemic, and “woke” policies, it isn’t surprising that many people have been willing to give up the beautiful state and fantastic weather. Understandably, some are upset with that turn of events, but the billboards put up in Los Angeles and San Francisco are a cheap shot. They warn Californians about mass public shootings in...

Depending on who you ask, vote fraud is dismissed as something that never happened, or used to happen but doesn’t happen anymore, or happens, but not in numbers significant enough to change an election, so who cares? I’ve always been particularly irritated by that last one, having had two good friends – members of a state legislature and a county board – win or lose elections by a single vote over the years (Penny Pullen was the Illinois State Rep, and the late Donald Conn was the Ogle County Board Member). Personally, I’ve always known that vote fraud is real....

Over 86,500 people have reportedly died in the United States from the Coronavirus, and the fear generated by those deaths is driving the public policy debate. But that number is a dramatic overcount. Our metrics include deaths that have nothing to do with the virus.

A new paper by three top researchers has revealed public health researchers are “are much more supportive of gun control than are either criminologists or economists.” The report, authored by John R. Lott, Arther Z. Berg. MD, and Gary A. Mauser, is headlined “Expert Views on Gun Laws.” Lott is founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, Berg is at the Harvard University Department of Psychiatry and Mauser is with the Simon Fraser University Beedie School of Business. The eight-page report appears in the Winter edition of Regulation, the Cato Institute’s review of Business and Government. The trio...

Fourteen states have now adopted these laws. Nine states adopted these laws last year after Parkland. Colorado will be the second state this year to adopt the law. U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, and Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, have similar laws that they are pushing.

Change is slowly coming across America. For example, a growing number of states and school districts are coming to the commonsense conclusion that we should not leave our children unprotected and defenseless in their schools.

Children are heading back to school with the debate over gun safety still raging six months after the Parkland massacre — and no issue is more heated than whether gun-free zones make students safer or more endangered. Led by President Trump, gun rights backers are increasingly on the offensive, pushing to roll back the general policy consensus, enshrined in federal law, that guns and schools generally don’t mix. A study by John R. Lott Jr., a gun crimes researcher, said close to 98 percent of mass shootings happen in gun-free zones, suggesting that they do little to stop, and may...

Cries for more “gun control” have flooded opinion and editorial pages in the wake of the school shooting in Connecticut. The opinion that Americans do not have a right to own firearms, and the assertion that the Constitution does not protect the right of individuals to own firearms, is absolutely false — and also incorrect in the context of law. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for private use within the...

Dennis Henigan and John Lott discuss Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court on gun rights and what this means for the debate on the right to bear arms. Dennis Henigan is also the Law & Policy vice president at the Brady Campaign. Washington, DC

Guns have become an important issue for Barack Obama’s campaign. Starting around the Pennsylvania primary, Obama and his campaign surrogates began strenuously assuring gun owners that he supports gun ownership, and it appears to be paying off. A poll in August showed that John McCain led Obama among hunters by only 14 percentage points, just about half the 27-point lead that President Bush held over John Kerry in 2004. If McCain had a similar lead, he would be ahead in most polls, particularly in many battleground states.This past weekend, Joe Biden, campaigning in southwest Virginia, called any notion that...

Dr. John R. Lott has done it again. The best selling author of the aptly-titled More Guns, Less Crime has penned an appropriately titled sequel: The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You’ve Heard About Gun Control is Wrong (published by Regnery, a sister company of Human Events).Lott, an economist who has held positions at Yale Law School, the University of Chicago, UCLA, and Stanford University, has put together an original study from empirical research that demonstrates every plausible facet of the pro-gun position. With this book in hand (which includes more than 50 pages of notes), you can confidently...

<p>By John R. Lott Jr.</p> <p>Should we treat the Second Amendment like the rest of the Bill of Rights and assume it protects Americans against an over-intrusive government, as the Bush administration now argues? While the question whether people have a right to protect their own lives and the lives of loved ones is important, for most the bottom line is simpler: Do gun laws reduce violent crime?</p>