John, welcome to the show. Thank you for for joining us today.
Oh, no, it's great to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on.
Well, I felt that this is a much needed episode after meeting you in person a couple of weeks ago here in the Philadelphia area,
because I think the discussion at dinner that we had and many others had was eye opening for me,
at least in terms of the extent to which the government, the media and politicians generally are abusing data and statistics to paint a scary narrative around around gun control specifically.
specifically. And one of the things that you said in response to the question that I asked you really
shook me because it was, and I think we should explain the data behind it, but I asked you if
gun registers serve any purpose other than bagging and tagging individual gun owners in the country
to eventually track them down and take their guns. And your response was that you've come to believe
that that is exactly why these registries exist.
Yeah, look, I mean, everybody wants to be able to go and solve crimes.
But, you know, we have a lot of data on this.
We have parts of the United States that, you know, they're relatively small parts,
but parts of the United States that have registration licensing of guns for many decades.
Hawaii has had registration licensing of guns since 1960.
Pennsylvania that you live in has had essentially registration for handguns since the 1930s, pretty much complete since then and earlier had it more sporadically.
You've had places like Chicago and Washington, D.C. and New York, which has had registration licensing.
Um, uh, Maryland and New York had very extensive, uh, even ballistic fingerprinting along with
registration, uh, and licensing for 15 years before they finally ended it.
And the one common thing that you see across all these that we have information on is that,
you know, outside of watching TV shows like Law and Order or something like that, or CBS's FBI,
registration, licensing just isn't used for solving crimes.
In theory, if a criminal leaves a gun at a crime scene and it's registered to the criminal,
you can go and trace it back to the criminal and solve the crime.
The problem is that crime guns are virtually never left at the crime scene.
In the few times that they are left at the crime scene,
And it's because the criminal has either been killed or seriously wounded.
So you've solved the crime anyway.
And a couple of times beyond that, that they're left at the crime scene, they're not registered.
And the once or twice that they are registered, they're not registered to the person who committed the crime.
And so and the thing is, these systems take a lot of resources.
I testified in Hawaii a while ago about a law that was considering changing the registration licensing program there to make it even more restrictive.
And before I went, because I always testify when I get asked by state legislators to do it, I told the legislators that were inviting me, I said, look, I'm told that the Honolulu police chief is going to be testifying on the other side.
Ask him two questions in advance so that he has to be able to go and answer the questions beforehand.
hand. One is, how many crimes since 1960 have they been able to solve as a result of licensing
and registration? And the second question is, how much does it cost each year to go and run the
program? He went back and looked at it, and he said he couldn't identify one single crime that
they've been able to solve as a result of registration and licensing. And when he was asked
how much it cost each year to go and run the program. He said he couldn't give a dollar amount,
but he said he estimated that it took 50,000 hours of police time each year to go and run
the registration and licensing program. Now, there are lots of things that work for policing.
50,000 hours worth of police time, if you had spent it on things that we know work,
could have been very beneficial in terms of catching criminals and making it risky for
criminals to commit crimes and reducing crime. But essentially what you've done is you've taken
50,000 hours of police time each year away from things that we know work, and instead putting in
something that the Honolulu police chief himself acknowledged he couldn't point to one single crime
that he'd been able to go and solve. And this isn't just the United States. I mean,
There's been court testimony in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., where they've admitted the same thing.
The program that they had in New York and Maryland, where they had registration and ballistic fingerprinting.
After 15 years, both of those states, both states that strongly support gun control, ended the programs because they were spending huge amounts of money.
I think in New York, they had spent like $45 million on the process, and they couldn't point to one single crime that they've been able to solve as a result of spending all that money.
Now, gun control advocates said, well, 15 years just wasn't long enough to determine whether or not the program was really going to work or not.
they needed more time. But look, even the strong gun control advocates in the New York state and
Maryland state legislatures, you know, it just they were just throwing good money after bad.
And they had better things to go and spend the money on. And so they even they ended the programs.
This reminds me of something we deal with in the Bitcoin industry, which stems from the Bank
Secrecy Act, all this KYC AML compliance. And this has been in the market for over 50 years
now at this point. And if you look at the amount of money laundering crimes that have actually
been stopped due to KYC AML compliance, it's I think something like 20 tenths of a percentage
point in terms of the amount of money that they've actually been able to recoup or the amount of
money that's flowed through the system, the system involved with criminal activity that
that KYC, AML, bag and tag compliance regulations have actually been effective at stopping.
So it seems whether it's guns or financial markets or banking specifically, the
obsession with collecting as much personal identifying information on individuals to
to track them is is brought throughout the government. And similarly with what your
response was to my question about the registrations for gun owners with KYC AML, it's not really
effective at finding criminals, but you bag and tag everybody in the banking system and you can
prevent them from doing things if they get out of line. Maybe they have political opinions that the
incumbent administration, any administration doesn't like that can freeze their bank accounts
or harass them financially.
It's just also additional costs that you're imposing on particular industries or whatever
that you don't like.
You know, as an economist, it's pretty simple.
You make something more costly, people do less of it.
And, you know, so it's just their way of essentially taxing and reducing the amount of activity
for things that they may not like in some way.
So, you know, in things like guns, you know, you have Connecticut, for example, a little
bit over a decade ago after Sandy Hook passed rules that essentially required the registration
of guns.
And they promised people at the time that there never would be any move to go and confiscate
the guns that were being registered. Well, I think it was like two years ago in Connecticut,
the governor there said, well, he's been thinking about it more. And he wanted to go and push to
confiscate the guns that they had registered, despite the initial promises that were there.
Fortunately, it was killed in the state legislature, but it was pretty close.
And, you know, that's basically what you see happening around the world.
You see registration, licensing, and then at some point they use that in order to confiscate the guns.
I mean, California and Chicago and D.C. have all used those types of rules that they've had then, you know, despite the initial promises there to go and confiscate the guns that people have.
And after going through your book, Gun Control Myths, you wrote More Guns, Less Crime as well.
I mean, it's become clear to me even before I read the book and started perusing crimeresearch.org, which is your website, the Crime Prevention Research Center.
the media and the politicians play a big part in this in the sense that they will cling on to
a myth and run with it and the unsuspecting public is for better for worse definitely for worse just
conditioned to take what the media tells them to the boob tube and the politicians tell them from
the pulpit and believe that it's true but i think a lot of your life's work has been dedicated to
proving that a lot of what they say is not true. And so with that in mind, like, what do you believe
are the biggest myths that are really driving a narrative that is not really seeped in fact or
logic? Right. It's almost hard to know where to start with regard to kind of, I mean, there are
different issues that are here, just the general media bias. I'll give you one example of something
that just is a pet peeve of mine.
And that is when you have these mass murders, these mass shootings that occur, the media
will very frequently talk about the diary or manifestos for these killers.
But they leave out and just absolutely refuse to talk about what I think is kind of a central
part of that.
And that is why these killers pick the targets that they do.
You know, you have something like the Minneapolis school shooting that we recently had.
You know, in that case, the individual went through great detail about why he picked the target.
He talked about learning from other mass school shooters, as well as mass these mass murderers in general.
and about how they had picked gun-free zones, places where they knew their victims wouldn't
be able to go and protect themselves.
I don't know.
I think that's newsworthy to know why these guys pick the targets that they do.
But yet you will look in vain for any media discussions about why the attacker picked
the target that he did.
not only did he want to go to a place where he knew none of his victims would have guns,
it even affected the time of day of the attack because he didn't want to go in the morning when
parents were dropping off kids at school or the afternoon when they're picking them up
because he was concerned that one of the parents might have a permitted concealed handgun
that were with him. The Nashville school shooter a few years ago, even in that case,
the police chief there at a press conference the day of the attack had read the diary for the
mass murderer there. And he talked about how she had picked the school because she had considered
other targets, but had declined to go after them because there were people with guns that might be
able to go and stop her You look at the Buffalo supermarket shooter Again he discussed in his manifesto why he picked the target that he did He wanted to go to a place where he knew his victims wouldn have permanent concealed hang guns And you know there like literally
several dozen of these mass murderers where they've made explicit statements about why they
picked the target. But you time after time after time, you will not see. And even though they'll
talk about the manifesto. And even though somebody like the Minneapolis shooter will go and talk
about other school shooters, they'll go and say, well, he talked a lot about other school shooters,
but they ignore why he was talking about them. And there are many other cases where the discussion
appears to be along similar lines, but it's more vague that nobody draws the connection with going
all the way back to Columbine. In Columbine, the state legislature there at the time was considering
final passage of a concealed carry law that would allow teachers and staff to carry permanent
concealed handguns on school property. According to, well, even the New York Times had a front page
story saying that Dylan Klebold and his dad were very upset about the law that was being considered.
Doug Dean, who was the majority leader in the state house at the time, said that,
And separately to me, that the that Dylan Klebold had written his state representatives asking them to vote against the bill, saying that he was strongly against it.
And what people ignore is that the day of the Columbine attack was the same day that just a few hours later, the state legislature was scheduled for final passage of the concealed carry bill that was there.
Is it just a coincidence that this guy who is so upset about the fact that teachers and staff might be able to go and carry guns on school property picked the day that there was final passage scheduled for allowing teachers and staff to be able to go and carry?
You know, I can't draw as direct connection as I can in some of these other cases, but surely it's suggested.
And so, I mean, it's just one thing.
But look, there's a more basic issue here, and that is what the media covers.
If the media constantly covers about bad things that happen with guns, but never talks about the benefits of people having guns, you know, it's not too surprising that you're going to have people that are going to be against gun ownership.
They think that if you just get rid of the guns, you're going to make places safer.
And, you know, I can give you tons of examples where the media simply doesn't cover defensive gun news stories.
So you have something like the Pulse nightclub shooting, which at the time was the worst mass public shooting in the United States history.
A week later, there was an attack at a nightclub in South Carolina.
Three people had been shot.
The attacker was shooting at a fourth person when a permanent concealed handgun holder shot and seriously wounded the attacker, ending the attack.
He still had something like 125 rounds of ammunition on him when he was stopped.
The Pulse nightclub attack in Florida was still getting massive national and international news coverage for weeks, not just one week after the attack that had occurred there.
But you, the attack in South Carolina didn't get any news coverage outside of the local media market that was there.
You know, one can only imagine if the permit holder hadn't been there and the guy had continued firing there, how much national and international news coverage it would have gotten.
The difference between Florida and South Carolina, Florida is one of 10 states that banned people being able to go and carry permitted concealed handguns in establishments that got more than 50 percent of their revenue from selling alcohol.
South Carolina was one of the 40 states that allowed people to go and carry.
You look at the Parkland school shooting.
Everybody knows about that.
That was getting coverage for years after the attack.
Shortly after that, same year, there was an attack at an elementary school not very far away in Titusville, Florida, where the school was having a celebration at the park right next to the school.
There were hundreds of students there.
There were parents.
There were teachers.
A man came up, started firing his gun.
Fortunately, because it was in a park, not in a school, there was somebody there with a permanent concealed handgun.
And he was able to shoot and seriously wound the attack or ending the attack.
And, you know, again, it just got local news coverage.
didn't get national news coverage. But one can only imagine if the permit holder hadn't been there.
I mean, you're still getting massive news coverage for Parkland.
This would have been a case that ended very differently. So, I mean, my guess is
the whole debate that we have about gun control would be dramatically different
if once in a while the media would say we've had yet another mass public shooting in a place where
guns are banned. I mean, 92 percent of mass public shootings where four more people are killed
take place in areas where guns are banned. Or news coverage once in a while that said we've had
yet another mass murderer where he explicitly targeted a place where he knew his victims
couldn't defend themselves, or if the media would sometimes give coverage to some of these dramatic,
heroic cases where attacks, where police have said that if it wasn't for the presence of a
permit holder, many people would have died. You know, it would be different. Yeah. And one last
thing that's related is just this impression that's pushed out time after time after time
that the United States is somehow unique in terms of mass public shootings. That's simply false.
You know, it's understandable why the news media covers such a mass murder in the United States
more than it covers it in, let's say, Europe or in other parts of the world like South America or
Asia or whatever. I mean, this is the United States. People are more interested in what
happens here. But we're nowhere near the top in terms of per capita rates of mass public shootings.
We're not in the top 50 in terms of per capita rates of mass public shootings.
Even if you were just to compare Western Europe, which doesn't have a particularly high rate of
mass public shootings to the United States, there are countries in Western Europe that have higher
per capita rates of mass public shootings. And in fact, if I were to go and ask you, I'd say,
okay, since 2010, for example, just comparing Western Europe to the United States,
could you tell me where the two worst mass public shootings have been?
Most people think that they're in the United States that I talked to. In fact,
You had the 2011 attack in Norway, where 67 people were murdered, ignoring the bombing deaths that were there.
That's much higher than anything in the U.S.
You have the Paris concert shooting in November 2015, where 130 people were shot to death.
You know, there's nothing even close to that in the United States.
And that's just Western Europe.
You know, just look at school shootings.
People refuse to put these numbers in per capita terms.
You look at Germany, for example, compared to the United States.
So these are attacks where four more people have been killed.
The United States has had nine mass public school shootings in the United States.
since 2000. Germany's had three. But Germany has like 83 million people in it. We have
340 million people. So we have more than four times the number of people. So if you put it in
per capita terms, that would be the equivalent of us having more than 12 mass public school shootings
compared to the nine that we actually had. You look at Finland. Finland has had two mass public
school shootings. But they have a population of five and a half million people. That's like one
60th, the rate that we have. That'd be the equivalent of us having 120 versus having nine.
Or Norway, which has had one mass public school shooting, also has a little bit over five million
people. That'd be the equivalent of us having like 60 of them. And of course, there are other
countries in Europe and Western Europe that have had these types of school shootings.
But most people don't even, you know, they don't even realize these things have occurred.
And no media outlet in the United States would go and compare the number of murders in Pennsylvania
with the number of murders in Rhode Island or Wyoming.
OK, everybody would adjust for it in per capita terms.
But for some reason, when they're talking about these mass murders,
they're making international comparisons to the extent that they do.
They just refuse to go and make these comparisons.
It's really astonishing.
You said something earlier about they believe that if you just eliminate all guns and you disarm the society,
crime will go down.
But I think a lot of your life's work has proved the exact opposite.
I mean, I've seen this up close and personal when I lived in Chicago for five years and in Cook County, guns are banned.
And despite that, Chicago is one of the most violent cities in the United States and has some of the most gun deaths in many years with the murder capital of the country.
And it still blows my mind that people don't understand that you can you can ban guns.
You can disarm the society, but that doesn't stop bad people from doing bad things.
They're bad people doing bad things.
If they are doing bad things, they're disregarding the laws already.
And I think the work you've done to highlight that disarmed societies aren't actually safer is extremely important.
Well, look, I mean, we have tried it, not only in the United States, but around the world.
Obviously, Chicago and Washington, D.C. tried banning all handguns for a while.
And, you know, we had increases in murder rates that occurred after the ban.
Chicago's handgun ban went into effect in November 1982.
Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban went into effect in February 1977.
In both of those cases, murder rates rose. They rose relative to other similarly sized cities dramatically. And, you know, but gun control advocates will tell you now, well, those were fair experiments, because unless you go and you ban guns every place, you know, people will go and get guns from the rest of Illinois or from Indiana or from Maryland or Virginia.
But, you know, that doesn't explain why it went up.
It may explain why it didn't go down the way they promised them to do.
But there are other problems with it, too.
And that is there are countries where they had the rule for the whole country that have
seen increases in murder rates.
There are island nations that have tried to do that, from Jamaica to the Solomon Islands
to, you know, Republic of Ireland to the UK.
And yet every single time that either all guns or all handguns have been banned, murder rates have gone up.
You would think if on net guns are bad as they want to go and claim, it should be easy to point to lots of places where you've banned guns and murder rates have gone down.
And yet now just out of randomness, you think once or twice when they ban guns, it would go down or at least stay the same.
And yet you can even point to one place where it even stayed the same And I think there a simple reason for this and that is when you go and you pass laws you have to be careful that you not primarily disarming law citizens
You may take a few guns away from criminals, but if you're primarily disarming the law-abiding
citizens who obey the ban or other types of gun control regulations, you are making it
easier for criminals to go and commit crimes.
That's basically what you see happening.
One of the big kind of statistical errors that people make is what we call cross-sectional comparisons.
So people on one side of the debate will go and point to Chicago.
People on the other side of the debate will go and point to the UK.
And they'll say, well, look, the UK has very low homicide rates compared to the United States.
And they have very strict gun control.
So it must be that the strict gun control is causing the UK to have a low homicide rate.
And that's simply false because the problem is, is that they had an even lower homicide rate compared to the United States before they had the strict gun control laws that they had.
In the eight years after the UK banned handguns in January 1997, the murder rate or the homicide rate, I'm sorry, in the UK increased by 50 percent.
It only fell back down after that, after they had a massive increase in the number of police officers, basically an 18 percent increase in a four year period of time.
But, you know, the thing is, you can look at island nations that would kind of you think would be like the ideal experiment for them to go in and ban guns.
And yet, even in those ideal conditions, you consistently every single time see murder and homicide rates go up.
And, you know, to me, that's pretty strong, devastating evidence.
You know, people will point to someplace like Japan also, and they'll say, look, Japan has strict gun control laws.
They have about 400,000 people who are licensed to own guns in Japan, mainly for hunting purposes.
But, you know, and they have a low homicide rate.
But the thing is, Japan has had pretty much the same gun control laws for hundreds of years.
You know, what you need to do is compare what happened to the murder rates before and after they changed their laws.
And you just simply can't do that with Japan.
But my guess is Japan, you know, a lot of island nations have very, very low homicide rates.
One thing I should have mentioned about the UK, there's an excellent book by historian Joyce Lee Malcolm from Harvard University Press called Guns and Violence.
And, you know, you have a city of London, the greater London area, had like 8 million people in it.
In 1900, this is 20 years before they had any gun control legislation at all, guns very commonly owned.
There were two gun murders in a city of 8 million people.
There were five armed robberies.
I can't even get my mind around having so few gun crimes in a place with that many people and no gun control regulations and guns very commonly owned.
In fact, the 1920 gun control law that they had in the first gun control law that they had in the UK had nothing to do with crime.
There was no concerns about the amount of crime that caused them to have it.
What happened was you just had the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and you had a situation in the UK where you had a lot of unemployed soldiers who had come home after World War I.
And they were concerned that they could have their own Bolshevik Revolution.
And so they wanted to go and pass rules that would disarm basically lower and middle income people with fees and other things.
And so that's the reason why they passed it. And after the different gun control laws, the big ones in 1920, 1956 and 1997, you saw, if anything, an increase in violent crime rates after those gun control laws were passed.
seems like an armed society is truly polite society yeah it's crazy and when you think about
wanting to reduce homicides and gun related uh homicides like obviously that is an admirable
and ethical thing to strive for but there's so many so many other lower hanging fruit
that need to be picked to that. And the fact that these low hanging fruit aren't being picked
signals me that there's some ulterior motive here. And the one, the lowest hanging fruit
that really sticks out to me, and I'm sure you've done research on it and have noticed it's become
part of the narrative, at least on X over the last few months is repeat offenders and the
amount of crime that they commit throughout their lives if they're allowed to.
get out of jail with a slap on the wrist because there's some DA who thinks that
locking up criminals is somehow discriminatory.
But OK, so a couple of things before I get quite good into that, just mention, look,
everybody wants to reduce crime, I hope.
But you can it's not rocket science.
You have to make it risky for criminals to go and commit crime.
And you can do that with higher restraints, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences.
But you can also do it by letting victims be able to go and defend themselves.
It also makes it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime.
Now, on this thing about the repeat offenders, you're right that a lot of it is motivated by what they call racial justice.
And, you know, so you have this notion out there that people in jail should the percentage of different racial groups should be equal to their shares of the population.
If 13 percent of the population is black, then 13 percent of the people in prison should be black.
And you have people like Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan and other places, the current governor, Josh Stein in North Carolina, when he was attorney general.
He had overseen a commission that dealt with kind of DEI policies for them.
And you see this in many Soros-type prosecutors from across the country.
Here's the irony, and that is, who do you think the victims of these crimes are?
People tend to commit crimes against people who are similar racially and social economically,
similar to the ones who are committing the crimes.
90% of blacks are murdered by other blacks.
So if you want to go and be easy on the black criminals, what it means is you're being bad
to the black victims that are there. So the question, you know, if you care about racial
justice, do you care about being fair to the black criminals or do you care about being
fair to the black victims? So when Trump did his federalization of law enforcement in D.C.,
you had many such as Maryland's Democratic governor, Wes Moore,
attacked Trump as his policies for federalizing the law enforcement there as being racist.
Because he said, you know, the only reason why Trump's doing this is because it's a heavily
black city.
Well, you know, 96 percent, of course, the latest data we have is like from 2021.
But up until that point, some like 96 percent of the murder victims were blacks.
So, you know, you go for like 18 days without a murder that occurred there.
Whose lives do you think you're saving?
You're saving black lives that are there.
Does that make it racist?
And, you know, we had a huge drop in all sorts of violent crime and property crime when you had that federalization that was there.
Look, in D.C., you had like 1,300 patrol officers.
So that means you have no more than at most a third on duty at any point in time for a district of 721,000 people.
You know, it's understandable why the D.C. police felt like they were being stretched too thin.
So when Trump put in more FBI, ATF agents, DEA agents, as well as the National Guard, he effectively more than doubled the boots on the ground at any point in time.
And there was a big increase in the number of arrests. But it's not just he basically covered all the bases there. He not only increased arrests, but the new U.S. attorney there who's in charge of prosecuting crimes in D.C.
It's unique, the relationship that the U.S. attorney has with prosecuting crimes in D.C. because it's a federal enclave compared to the rest of the country.
The U.S. attorney there is in charge of prosecuting crimes by adults.
Judge Jean Perrault had a very different policy of going after criminals compared to during the Biden administration.
The U.S. attorney that Biden put in there in 2022 refused to prosecute 67 percent of arrests.
In 2023, he refused to prosecute 56 percent of arrests.
So, you know, you're not prosecuting.
You're not arresting them.
You're not prosecuting them.
You're not punishing them even when you do prosecute them very much.
And you make it very difficult for people to be able to have guns for protection.
One of the things that Trump also did, he put pressure on D.C. to speed up the process for concealed carry permits.
It was taking six to eight months or more sometimes for people to go through the process to get a concealed carry permit in D.C.
Trump was able to get that reduced to at most two weeks.
You know, all those things matter in terms of making it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime. Now, is there more that needs to be done? Yeah. But at least it was a start. And you see similar benefits that are occurring in Memphis. So it's not getting the type of news attention that Trump's moving assets into D.C. got.
I think in part because it's been working so well in terms of reducing crime.
So it's not something that people want to talk about.
One thing I saw a survey of Chicago residents where they asked them whether they would support Trump kind of federalizing law enforcement in Chicago like he had done in D.C.
Hispanics strongly supported it.
Blacks supported that policy by Trump.
The people who opposed it were basically whites, apparently relatively well-to-do whites, who were liberals.
So the people who were least affected by the crimes that were occurring were the ones who were the most strongly opposed to Trump trying to go and clean up the problem that was there.
And this is what you see all the time with the defunding of the police and other things.
It's basically minorities in the poor who want to have police because they're the ones who bear the brunt of the crimes that are there.
And the people who, you know, support doing things like defunding or opposing Trump on these things are, you know, people who aren't affected.
no i mean that really highlights starkly the effect the propaganda effect of white guilt and
the whole dei narrative that has been pushed on on the public for the last two decades i would say
very aggressively but it seems like tides are turning people are beginning to wake up to these facts but you mentioned that the D the sort of actions that Trump taken in D specifically have had good effects but there more that can be done in your mind
What is the ideal policy to have towards crime to make sure you lower it and keep people safe?
Well, you got to make it costly and risky for criminals to commit crime.
And while the U.S. attorney there can go and handle adult crimes, juvenile crimes are not really being punished.
You had a situation recently where a Doge employee or former Doge employee whose nickname was Big Balls had been in DuPont Circle, which is a nice area.
It's not that far away from the White House.
I've spent a fair amount of time over the years around that area.
And he was trying to protect this woman that was there.
He was savagely beaten by 10 juveniles.
If you see in the pictures, he was very bloodied afterwards, had to go to the emergency room, had a concussion, had other problems that had occurred.
When they arrested the individuals, the magistrate there decided not to hold them and release them. And then when they finally were convicted of the crime, she decided that they wouldn't serve any jail time.
You know, and one of the guys, I think, immediately committed another felony within like a week after he was caught for.
So, you know, if you don't make it risky for criminals to commit crime, you're going to have still have more crime.
Now, there are some long term benefits from what Trump did, even though, you know, they've pulled back on the federalization of the law enforcement there.
And that is they arrested a lot of people. So they were kind of taken off the streets. And as long as they're still off the streets, you know, you have a small group of criminals who commit a disproportionate amount of the violent crime that's there.
And so there'll be some continued benefit from that. But, you know, it's it's you got to do other things. You got to keep it up. You got to change the laws there in D.C. You have to change the mind of of of the judges there.
If it were me, I would make it so that the U.S. attorney could go and handle the cases involving juveniles, too.
So because it doesn't seem like they really have, you know, kind of the backbone or whatever you want to call it for them to do that.
But it's not rocket science.
You know, you go back to the 1960s and Washington, D.C. had one of the premier law enforcement departments in the country.
You know, there's been decades where the arrest rates have plummeted and it's not too – and they're not punishing them.
And so it's not too surprising that crime is much higher now than it used to be.
And there, of course, there are issues about corruption and manipulation with the crime data at D.C. as well as other things.
You've had a number of police officers who, at the risk to their own careers, have come forward with sworn statements saying that they were ordered to reclassify crimes.
You know, one homicide detective said that he was ordered to reclassify a murder as taking somebody to the hospital, which isn't even a crime.
So it just, you know, and others that would say you'd have lieutenants or others that would come down and basically make them reclassify felonies as misdemeanors.
And so, you know, it's – and unfortunately, it's not only D.C.
You've seen that in many other places.
Chicago has had a number of accusations about that.
New York City, Manhattan, for example.
Alvin Bragg refuses to prosecute firearms offenses by criminals.
He'll prosecute a firearms offense by somebody who's otherwise a law-abiding citizen, but not criminals.
And one thing that makes a difference between aggravated assault, which is a felony, and a misdemeanor, simple assault, is often whether a weapon was involved.
And the problem is that while the prosecutor is refusing to include weapons so that it gets downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor, they put pressure on the police not to go and record that a weapon was used to begin with because the prosecutor's office doesn't want to take all the kind of heavy lifting for reclassifying these things.
They don't want to take all the blame for reclassifying.
So they put pressure on the police not to go and record it to begin with.
And so that doesn't go into their police reports.
And then that doesn't get into the FBI data that's there, which only records the felony aggravated assaults and doesn't record misdemeanor simple assaults in comparison.
So you have lots of problems in just kind of comparing crime data across cities.
Why is it?
Do they truly want anarcho-tyranny?
Is there a belief that there is discrimination
and so they feel it's their ethical duty to be light,
to issue light sentences or declassify felonies to misdemeanors?
Is it a narrative play that they really want it to seem like
left-leaning social policies are successful?
Right. Well, I mean, again, just because you're concerned about the race of the criminal, that means you're not concerned about the race of the victims. And criminals tend to harm others that are similar to themselves.
And it's not just the direct victims of crime. You have the indirect victims of crime. You have someplace like Washington, D.C., where I mentioned you have a number of Democrats that were claiming that Trump's policies were racist there.
You know
You have stores closed because of the crime
Who's more likely to own a store
Disproportionately compared to other places in D.C.
It's blacks
Who works in those stores?
Who shops in the stores that are closing
Or have to charge higher prices because of the crime?
It's overwhelmingly blacks
Who owns homes
Whose property values are depressed
Because of the higher crime rates
Well, again, it's overwhelmingly blacks. So, you know, it's not just the direct victims are overwhelmingly similar to the criminals that they care about, but all these indirect costs that occur there, they're harming all sorts of law-abiding good people at the expense of going and trying to protect criminals based on their race.
And the problem is much broader in the sense that – I can't remember where I was going to go on this, but it'll probably come to me in a minute.
But the – oh, I remember now.
Look, at least the Democrats are consistent on this, and that is they don't want to make it costly and risky for criminals to commit crime.
And so they don't want to have higher arrest rates.
They don't want to have higher conviction rates.
They don't want to have longer prison sentences.
And they also don't want to let victims be able to go and defend themselves. So they support very strict gun control laws. And those primarily disarm law-abiding individuals that are there who are more likely to be victims.
It would be great if the police could be there all the time, but the police can't.
If my research convinces me of anything, the people who benefit the most from owning guns are the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime.
And that overwhelmingly tends to be poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas.
It also tends to be people who are relatively weaker physically, women and the elderly.
You're almost always talking about a male criminal doing the attack.
And when a man is attacking a woman, there's a much larger strength difference that exists there than a man attacking another man.
So Democrats claim that they care about minorities.
They claim that they care about women.
And yet they make them much more vulnerable to these types of crimes.
And, you know, this discrimination across gun control laws just consistently, these gun control laws primarily disarm minorities and the poor.
I'll just give you one thing, example, that's, you know, I think is shocking.
And that has to do with the errors in the NICS background check system.
You know, you'll very frequently hear claims that there have been 4 million dangerous prohibited people that have been stopped from owning guns because of background checks.
That's simply false.
What they should say is that there have been 4 million initial denials, and something over 99% of those are mistakes, false positives.
You know, just to give you a simple way to think about this.
In any given year, you may have 125,000 denials, but you only have like 20 prosecutions and maybe 12 convictions.
Well, these are like the easiest cases in the world to prosecute.
Somebody signed the 4473 form saying that they haven't been a felon.
You can't go and say, I forgot I was in prison for five years.
OK, that's not a defense that they're going to be able to go and use in that situation.
And, you know, they signed a form swearing that that is true, everything that's there.
They provided an ID when they bought it.
So they're identified.
And in the vast majority of time, it's on film, them buying the gun.
And so, you know, these are like the easiest cases in the world to prosecute.
There's like no defense that can be put up against it.
And yet you have you have almost no prosecutions.
And why don't you have any prosecutions?
Well, the reason why you don't have any prosecutions is because they're not real cases.
When you fill out the 4473 to buy a gun, you put down your name, your address, your social security number, your birthday, your race, your eye color.
You think the government's using all that information, and the answer is no.
What they usually use is just roughly phonetically similar names and similar birthdays.
And the problem is, is that people tend to have names similar to others in their racial groups.
So about 18% of Hispanic males are felons. About 34% of black males are felons.
6% of whites, about 1.5% of Asians. Hispanics have names similar to Hispanics. Blacks tend to have names similar to other blacks.
And so where do you see the mistakes?
You see the mistakes overwhelmingly involving black males and Hispanic males, law-abiding, good black and Hispanic males that simply happen to have names that are roughly phonetically similar to others.
If private companies who do background checks on employees had an error rate that was 100th the error rate that the federal government has, they'd be sued out of existence.
You try to fix this type of thing. And I've made offers many times to go and write an op-ed with people in the gun control movement to go and say, look, I even support these universal background checks that you want to have if we just fix a few of the things like these errors in the existing background check system.
I don't even know how one can justify having these types of errors that are there.
You know, if you were to go to a private company and say, I think you ought to look at roughly fanatically similar names when you're looking at, you know,
criminal backgrounds for your employees and similar birthdays, they will look at you like
you're from Mars because they'll know the huge discriminatory impact that that's going to have
by doing something like that. But yet, you know, the federal government does that all the time.
And I've come to believe that Democrats actually think that this is a feature rather than a bug
in the system. Why would they like this feature? Because it just stops people from owning guns.
You have 4 million people that have been denied. Now, you can go and appeal, okay? But the problem
is that the vast majority of people who appeal are going to have to hire a lawyer. You're talking
about $3,000 on up for a lawyer to go and help you on this. So somebody may want to have a gun,
But is it really worth $3,000 to go through the process to go and get a mistake fixed that was a mistake caused by the government that was no fault of those individuals there and to spend the time to go through the process to go and get things fixed?
The vast majority of people don't think it's worthwhile for their time to go and do that, particularly if you're a lower income or a middle income person.
You know, and there are other things there.
You look at these background checks.
So I don't know, we have like 18 or so states that have these universal background checks,
which are background checks on the private transfers of guns.
So in Washington, D.C., it costs $125 to do a background check on a private transfer for gun.
Now, in a lot of states, you don't see the cost of the background check because it's not like a sales tax that gets added onto it.
It's part of the price of buying the gun when you go and you buy a gun.
But there are, you do see it when you have these private transfer type laws.
And the thing is, let's say you and I were in D.C., Marty, and I'm going to go and give you four guns.
It's just John giving Marty four guns.
You think it's one person giving one person all the guns.
It should just be one background check, right?
But instead, these laws are consistently written to require a separate background check on each gun.
So rather than being $125, which is bad enough to begin with, it would cost $500 to go through the process to do the background check on the gun.
Now, I want somebody to give me a benign explanation for why you would set it up like that, other than you just want to discourage people who are law-abiding, who are going through the process of doing the background check there on a private transfer as opposed to just giving the person a gun and not going through the government background check there.
give me a benign explanation for why you would require a separate background check on each gun
rather than just the one person who's receiving all the guns i've never heard a benign explanation
for it no it doesn't make any sense i mean i think other than they just want to make it costly
for people to be able to go and get guns well and the people are committing crimes who are not going
goes through the background check. Not only is it easy. Well, that's the other thing.
That's the other thing. If you believe these background checks reduce crime, and I'm very
skeptical about it, but let's say you believe it reduces crime, then presumably you want to
encourage people to go out of their way to go and do the background check. I mean, I could just go
and give you the gun, but now we have to go and find a federally licensed dealer, give the gun to
the licensed dealer, pay them, and then they'll transfer it to the other person once they've gone
through the background check. But you don't tax things that you want to encourage people to do,
right? And here we're taxing them to do it. So they're going to do less of it.
The other thing is, if you believe that these background checks reduce crime,
it reduces crime for everybody, not just the law-abiding people who are going out of their
way to go and obey the law that's there. So as an economist, I would say the people who benefit
should be the ones who pay. If everybody benefits, then everybody should pay. Pay for it out of
general revenue. I can't tell you the number of times. So for both of those reasons, that you want
to encourage people to do the background checks, as well as having people who benefit be the ones
who pay. I'd say pay for this out of general revenue if you really believe that these things
are beneficial. But Democrats will fight you tooth and nail against doing that. And to me,
I look at that and I say, you know, that just tells me they like the fact that there's a tax
on people getting guns and that that's the benefit that they think that they're getting out of it.
Yeah, I mean, the
conspiratorial beast that lives in me things the whole push to make it harder to get guns and the push to disarm And I think we should definitely touch on the idea of
But it's the poor people. It's the poor minorities. I mean, Democrats claim that they care about the
poor, that they care about minorities, and yet they adopt these rules that make it so those are
the very people, despite the fact that they're the ones who benefit the most from having guns,
be able to go and get it. I'll give you another example. You look at the fees for getting a
concealed carry permit. There's been a move over many decades to lower the cost of people getting
permits in states that have these rules. Texas, about a decade ago, lowered the fee from $140
for a five-year permit down to $40.
All the Republicans voted for reducing the fee.
All but one of the Democrats voted against reducing the fee.
So, you know, the thing is, when you saw the reduction in the fees,
there was a big increase in the percentage of the permit holders who were black.
you know
I
yeah
it's well
my mind wanders to countries like Australia
because I know many Australians
and they warn
of the gun confiscations
because they say hey
we had pretty good
liberal gun rules here
in Australia and then they took
our guns and
And since then, we've slowly but surely been moving toward a more Orwellian system where the government has a lot more control over our lives.
And when we talk about all the data that you've highlighted over the last hour and it becomes very obvious to anybody with more than two brain cells that can look at statistical and data analysis and say that these things are ineffective.
It's like, OK, you can be beat to dead with these statistics, but yet the left, the Democrats will consistently push to take guns away.
And at some point, the broader public has to acknowledge with this data in mind that it's not really to save lives.
It's to garner control, more control over people's lives.
So that –
Well, you know, Australia is an interesting example because just the amount of misinformation and I would argue statistical malpractice with regard to the data.
So you'll very frequently hear claims that there's been like 50 percent drops in firearm homicides or firearm suicides after the gun confiscation that they had in 96 and 97.
About 30 percent of the guns that were owned in the country, legally owned, were confiscated.
And you would imagine if that worked, you should have seen an immediate sharp drop that had occurred.
That's not what you see.
Let's say you had a perfectly straight line that was falling over the whole period.
you could take any point along that line, and the after average is going to be below the before
average. And that's what all the comparisons are. They just compare the after average with the
before average. What you find when you look at the Australian data is that for 15 years prior
to the confiscation, firearm homicide and firearm suicide rates were falling.
So if it had continued falling at exactly the same rate after the confiscation as it had beforehand, you'd look at it and say, it doesn't look like it had any impact.
What you want to do is, does it fall at a faster rate or a slower rate?
Is there some type of discontinuity that occurred in the line right at the point in time when it occurred?
And so when you look at it, what you in fact define it, so it's falling for 15 years prior
and firearm homicide rates actually stopped falling after that for about eight years.
I look at that and I say, look, it was falling.
It immediately stopped falling.
If anything, it seems like it had a pernicious effect rather than a benefit that everybody
claims.
It's simply going looking at the before and after average when I have this big drop in
the 15 years beforehand gives me an after average that's below the before average, even though it had
a pernicious effect that was there. And the same thing basically true for firearm suicides.
But there are other issues that are there. If you look at suicides, one thing that I would always
argue is that you should look at total suicides rather than just firearm suicides. There are lots
the substitutes. Before, when we were talking about either gun bans on all guns or all handgun
bans, not only did you see murder and homicide rates go up after the ban, but what you also saw
was no change in total suicides. Firearm suicides may go down, but total suicides just do not change
after you have these bans And basically what happens is that people switch into other ways of going and committing suicide There are lots of substitutes that are quote equally successful for people who want to go and commit suicide with
There's a lot of misinformation in terms of how people compare different methods of committing suicide.
Some methods which are actually even less painful than using a gun.
And so what you want to look at what's happening in total suicide.
And total suicides actually went up in Australia after the confiscation there.
And I'm not going to go and claim that it increased total suicides, but it sure as heck is evidence
that it didn't decrease it.
You know, and there are other issues that are happening there.
One of the big things that also needs to be pointed is that while you had this 30% confiscation,
people were able to go and buy guns again after the confiscation.
And by 2010, the gun ownership rate in Australia was above what it was prior to the confiscation.
So if the gun control advocates are correct, what you should have seen is an immediate sharp drop in these numbers that they're looking at with firearm homicides or suicides.
And then a gradual increase over time until you get to the gun ownership rate being above what it was beforehand.
You know, probably about a decade later, it would have been above what it was beforehand.
That's not what you see.
You don't see this immediate sharp drop in an increase.
You see it stopped falling and basically flat afterwards.
And so, you know, it's on so many different levels.
It's just that, you know, the New York Times and other things just keep repeating these
false claims there about what impact it had on crime rates.
And my guess is a lot of people in Australia, you know, believe it just because, you know,
you talk about the impact of the media.
The media is just constantly repeating the same things over and over again, just looking
at just the simple before and after averages, which in this case, as in many others, is
just very misleading.
Well, another thing that's misleading to is I mentioned earlier, but this fascination with assault weapons, AR-15s specifically.
And one thing I think that you've done really well throughout your career, I was actually watching a C-SPAN interview you did four years ago.
And you were highlighting that assault weapons ban and the fascination with AR-15 is completely nonsensical because it is essentially a Glock that just looks different.
Right. Well, I mean, most of the guns sold in the United States are semi-automatic guns, but 85 percent of the guns sold in the United States are semi-automatic.
That's one pull the trigger, one bullet comes out, it reloads itself.
There's a benefit for civilians having semi-automatic guns.
I mean, if you have to fire more than one shot in self-defense, you may not have the time to manually reload your gun.
I mean, so we have three types of guns.
One is manually reloading.
After you fire a shot, you have to yourself physically chamber another bullet.
Another was semi-automatic, which after you fire, it reloads itself.
And then the third is fully automatic or machine gun, which as long as you have the trigger depressed, bullets will get fired that are there.
And you just don't see crimes being committed with automatic weapons in the United States.
The assault weapons ban just dealt with semi-automatic guns.
And the thing is, you have something like an AR-15.
It has a .223 caliber bullet, so that's a little bit less than a quarter of an inch in diameter that you have there.
Essentially, it's the equivalent of a small caliber hunting rifle.
So you ban basically the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.
You had Senator Feinstein's staff go through gun catalogs.
And basically based on how the guns looked, they would include them by listing their names, whether or not the gun was banned or not.
And so the manufacturer could make some slight cosmetic change and rename the gun and be able to resell it.
Or you had other guns that were functionally identical, firing the same bullets with the same rapidity, doing the same damage that were never banned to begin with.
Why anybody would think that the assault weapons ban would have any impact on crime rates is not immediately obvious to me.
And in fact, the vast majority of academic research that's been done on this finds that it had no impact.
The one thing that Biden and Democrats would constantly refer to is there this one study by this guy named Louis Clarivas who was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst at the time who has his own definition of mass public shootings And he claimed that the number of attacks fell during the assault weapons ban and then went up afterwards But here the problem And that is even if you take his definition of assault weapons okay and his definition of what constitutes a mass public shooting what you should have seen if it was the law that was driving the changes
is that the percentage of mass public shootings involving these so-called assault weapons was driving the drop.
The percentage of attacks involving assault weapons should have fallen during the assault weapons ban
and that the percentage of attacks involving assault weapons after its sunset should have increased.
You see the opposite.
Even using his data, when the assault weapons ban went into effect, the percentage of attacks involving assault weapons increased.
So it can't be the fact that people weren't using assault weapons then was driving the drop then that was occurring.
And when it sunset, the percent of attacks involving the so-called assault weapons fell.
So, you know, I don't know how much more simply you can make the point there about what's driving the change.
There are lots of reasons why these numbers go up and down over time.
But if it's the assault weapons ban that was driving it, then the percentage should have fallen during the ban and then increased when the ban ended.
You got the opposite.
what can we do excuse me to make this more obvious like what what do you in your mind
what needs to happen really shows like yours i guess uh you know i i kind of feel overwhelmed
with my center uh my center uh you know we have like five people that work for us uh we have a
budget about $400,000 a year. The federal government gives out $100 million a year for
public health research on guns. We did a survey a while ago of academic researchers
who had published peer-reviewed academic research on guns. And criminologists and economists were
very skeptical about gun control. The policies that they thought would be most likely to reduce
murders and mass public shootings were things like getting rid of gun-free zones that we talked
about earlier. But the public health people are most sympathetic to gun control, and they're the
ones who get the federal money. Michael Bloomberg spends a couple hundred million dollars a year
on financing this. You have places like the Arnold Foundation, which has put in $50 million a year
to places like RAND. You have other ones like Soros that puts in about $20 million a year.
And then you have places like different states from California, which puts in $10 million a year
to public health, Hawaii, New Mexico, you know, across the country to Massachusetts that put in,
you know, more millions of dollars into this stuff. So I don't know how they spend so much money
on this type of thing. But and you have these kind of biases in it. You know, I wish we could
go and hire another researcher to go and do this type of stuff. Maybe another research assistant
to go and help us put data together quickly on these types of issues. But, you know, we do what
we can on these things. You know, so, but it's being on shows like yours, you know, to try to
educate people on it. And nobody needs to take my word for any of this stuff. If they go to our
website at crimeresearch.org and they click on any of the links that we have there for the studies
and research that we do, what you'll find is that I have another interview I'm supposed to be doing
right now. So I apologize. Well, I mean, we're ending on a good note. Go to crimeresearch.org.
help John out. You guys accept Bitcoin for donations.
Yeah. And I know I know Bitcoiners are passionate about at least some are passionate about issues like this.
So if you want to help John and his team at Cripe Prevention Research, make sure.
You go you go donate, because I think the data that you're getting out there, the research that you're doing is very important.
And I think the gun control debate that has been sort of put in front of people in the United States is woefully misguided and not backed by good data and research.
And what you're providing is that good data and research.
So, John, thank you for that.
Make sure you guys go pick up the book, More Guns, Less Crime and Gun Control Myths.
We'll link to this, these in the show notes.
And thank you for your work, John.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
I appreciate you being there.
Appreciate it.
All right. Thank you very much.
Thank you.