Free Republic

When General Motors and Ford sell more cars, they are involved in more accidents. They undoubtedly advertise more in those places where they sell more cars. Does that mean that the car companies are responsible for additional accidents in those places? That they are purposefully plotting to create more accidents? Let’s hope not, but if Monday’s $570 million verdict by an Oklahoma judge against Johnson & Johnson for making opioids is any indication, those types of cases aren’t going to be far off. Oklahoma had refused to settle out of court believing that they could receive a very large verdict....

The media is intent on blaming President Trump and Republicans for any violence. They accuse Republicans of stoking the violence and claim that “right-wingers” have been more violent than their counterparts on the left. Both sides want to claim that they are the ones who have been wronged. Democrats point to pipe bombs sent to Democrats. Republicans point to members of the Trump administration and even senators who have been accosted at restaurants. Then there are the ricin letters, the shootings and the fires at party offices.

I don’t like bullies. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece pushing back against Andrew Kaczynski and the rest of CNN’s KFile unit, which has made a mission of taking out certain Republicans. Townhall published the piece, in which I defended David Clarke, Monica Crowley and Congressman Jason Lewis from CNN’s attacks. But Townhall immediately removed it after CNN’s Kaczynski said my claims were incorrect.

The Obama administration claims that it was their passage of massive government spending that saved the United States from another Great Depression. Last week, Larry Summers, Obama's top economic adviser, claimed that because of the stimulus: "We have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery. Most importantly, we have seen a substantial change in the trend of job loss." And Vice President Biden declared at the end of September: "In my wildest dreams, I never thought it [the stimulus] would work this well." As President Obama and other Democrats have...

The candidate says he supports the right to bear arms. The record says otherwise. Barack Obama claims he is a friend of gun owners. He certainly has convinced the media. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times said the NRA's opposition to Obama seemed strange because "Obama does not oppose gun rights. He has made a point of pounding this home to rural audiences, telling them he has no intention of taking their guns away: not their shotguns, not their handguns, not anything." From the Boston Globe to FactCheck.org, the media and their watchdogs have uncritically recited Obama's statement that he...

Re "Shooting holes in a lawsuit," Opinion, May 31 Jon Wiener claims that "nobody" tried to replicate my research, which demonstrated that right-to-carry laws reduce crime rates. This is false. Not only has everyone who tried managed to replicate my findings, but many academics have gone beyond that and shown that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime under a variety of approaches (see johnrlott.tripod.com/postsbyday/RTCResearch.html). Wiener fails to note that since my research was published, not a single peer-reviewed publication has found that right-to-carry laws increase crime, and there is research that finds even larger drops than I found. Wiener's Google search...

Could it be that more guns cause less crime? Could it be that criminals who suspect their potential victims are armed would be deterred from committing crimes? That's what John R. Lott Jr. argued in his 1998 book, "More Guns, Less Crime." But could it be that Lott is wrong; that other researchers have been unable to confirm his thesis? That's what Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argued in their bestselling 2005 book, "Freakonomics." How should this debate be resolved? Lott's solution is to try to get the U.S. District Court in Chicago to issue an injunction blocking...

  Pattern of Deceit is Deeper than Times Wants to Admit By John R. Lott Jr.       The New York Times has suffered a major black eye with revelations that one of its reporters made up events, facts, or engaged in plagiarizism some 50 times. Yet, the Times has won praise for owning up to this problem, and in doing so may seem to have put the controversy behind it. Unfortunately, this pattern of reporting goes much deeper than the Times admits. As an example, take the major 20,000 word series on "rampage killings" the Times published during...