By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Author/researcher John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said gun prohibitionists “want you to believe that if we can just get rid of the guns, we can save all these kids’ lives.”
It’s not so, and he offered illustrations during a 20-minute talk at the Gun Rights Policy Conference while he was discussing the allegation that more children are being killed with guns than are dying in traffic accidents. He showed charts covering the three years from 2019 to 2021 and when focusing on deaths among adolescents and children, more people under age 18 die in car crashes than from gunshot wounds.
Assertions from gun control proponents, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris about kids and gun-related deaths is “false in so many ways,” Lott said.
Pointing to last month’s effort by New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to prohibit the carrying of firearms in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County because three youngsters had been killed over the three previous months in drive-by shootings was a mistake in many ways.
“Every place in the world that has tried to either ban all guns or all handguns,” Lott said, “every single time, murder rates have gone up.”
“We tried banning handguns in Chicago and Washington DC,” he observed, “and what happened to murders? They went up.”
Them reason New Mexico’s ban would not have worked is simple. Lott said people with gun permits are not the ones committing the crimes. He reminded the audience that both the Bernalillo County Sheriff and Albuquerque police sheriff opposed the short-lived Grisham ban, because they know law-abiding citizens are not the problem. Yet, Grisham’s edict only pukt pressure on the law-abiding.
“Every place in the world that has tried to either ban all guns or all handguns,” he reiterated, “every single time, murder rates have gone up.”
One reason is because by disarming all of the law-abiding citizens, criminals will not face armed resistance to anything they want to do.
Lott addressed the GRPC audience to wrap up the first day of the weekend event, held in Phoenix, Ariz. Using a variety of charts and graphs, he was able to offer contrasting arguments to those espoused by gun control proponents.
During his presentation, Lott also took the FBI to task for under-reporting the number of times armed citizens intervened in mass shootings. He explained the FBI reported that armed citizens were only able to stop 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2022. His research revealed 440 incidents in which armed citizens stopped 157 of them.
