By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
“By far the safest course of action to take when you’re confronted by a criminal, and this is true for everybody, but it’s particularly true for women, is to have a gun.”
That was the word from internationally-known researcher and author Dr. John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and recipient of this year’s Gun Rights Defender of the Year award from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He was speaking at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Dallas, where he also discussed concealed carry, and how a considerable number of the nation’s homicides occur in very small areas in the U.S.
“The presence of a gun represents a much bigger relative change in a woman’s ability to resist and attack than it does for a man,” Lott noted. “Guns are used defensively to stop crimes about five times more frequently than they are used in the commission of crimes. We have data from the National Crime Victimization Survey which indicates how many gun crimes we have occur each year. It’s about 300,000. And I would argue we have at least 1.5 million defensive gun uses that are occurring each year.”
He also said about 30 percent of carry permit holders nationwide are women.
Lott told the audience about traveling to other parts of the world where it is virtually impossible for people to have guns for self-defense. He said in many countries where he has had the opportunity to talk with people about crime, he has detected a feeling of helplessness one may not find here in America.
The veteran researcher and author of the landmark book More Guns, Less Crime, Lott opened his report acknowledging the fact that having 29 states with “constitutional (permitless) carry” laws makes it tougher to determine how many law-abiding citizens are armed for personal protection.
What he does know is that “General election voters have permits at about twice the rate of non-voters.”
“I don’t know if that relationship is the same for people who are just carrying concealed, but in the most recent survey, you find almost 15% of adults say they carry all or most of the time. You have slightly over 15% that say they carry some or at least once in a while. So that’s 30% across the country. And obviously that’s much, much higher in constitutional carry states than it is in other states.”
Lott, who worked briefly at the Department of Justice during the first Trump administration, commended the current Trump administration for taking action against places which are charging egregiously high fees for concealed carry permits and the application process. The DOJ brought a lawsuit against a jurisdiction in California for this. The process is raising interesting questions.
“And what you need to understand,” Lott explained, “is that so often these gun control laws stop the very people who need protection the most from being able to go and have guns. If my research convinces me of anything it’s basically poor blacks living in high crime urban areas are the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime who benefit the most from being able to go and protect themselves, and there’s so many of these laws that basically prevent those very people from being able to go and have guns.”
As an example, he compared Illinois to neighboring Indiana.
“In Illinois only about 4% of adults have a concealed carry permit,” Lott said. “In Indiana, it’s 23%. That’s a pretty huge difference for two neighboring states. Why is that? Well, it turns out that there’s actually a very simple reason for that. And that is in order to go through the whole process, training and paying the $150 for the fee in Illinois, you’re talking about something that is over $400 to go through the process to get a concealed carry permit.
“In Indiana,” he noted, “they don’t even charge you for the background check. It’s literally zero cost for being able to and get a concealed carry permit. You make it more costly, fewer people are going to go do it.”
Lott also took aim at what he considers a major canard from the gun prohibition lobby: the effectiveness of background checks in preventing guns from falling into the wrong hands.
“You’ll frequently hear from gun control advocates or Democrats that over 5 million people have been stopped from getting guns because of background checks,” he observed. “That’s simply a lie.
“What they should say is that there have been 5 million initial denials,” Lott explained. “But the thing is, virtually all of those are mistakes. You look at any year what you’ll find is that maybe 150,000 or 125,000 or 200,000 denials have occurred over the course of a year but there’ll only be prosecutions against maybe 24, and maybe get 10 convictions or something like that.”
He also insisted that police “are probably among the strongest supporters of private gun ownership that we have.”
As for homicides, Lott offered some insight that one doesn’t normally hear.
“Murders in the U.S. are incredibly concentrated in tiny areas,” he said. “About 54% of the murders take place in 2% of the counties…You find that in these counties, about two-thirds of their murders take place in 10-block areas. There’s really no other country that has murders as heavily concentrated in tiny areas as we do.”
The solution? Lott reported on a survey which asked not only whether people would support more gun laws or just enforce the existing laws, to which a third option was added: Rather than enforcing gun control laws, should police concentrate on arresting violent criminals and end cashless bail for repeat criminals. More people want police to go after bad guys.
