From the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) this week comes bad news for President Obama and the big gun control push he has chosen to be the faltering finale of his domestic agenda. But it’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about those responsible gun owners who legally carry a firearm for self-protection. In the typically meticulous and granular detail criminologist John Lott is famous for, Lott and his CPRC researchers determined in a 2014 report the number of concealed ca...

An all too common bit of conventional wisdom is that children and guns don’t mix. In this view, no good can come from kids learning anything about how guns work, the rules of gun safety (other than terrified avoidance), or shooting sports. This has never been true, and now it seems children are being allowed, even encouraged, to pursue shooting sports more than ever, along with being caught tennis and it could be as easy as watching a tennis serve video to learn about tennis. Youtube is a gr...

The outraged media partisans might as well have led with the headline “House Speaker Boehner wants more African-Americans to die of gun violence”. Stories in Business Insider and PRI led with a paragraph all but accusing Congress of deliberately risking another massacre of black churchgoers by recently continuing its long-standing ban on federal funding of gun control advocacy at the Centers for Disease Control. These were supposedly straight news stories, not editorials. And I have no do...

Science is supposed to be objective and data-based. Unfortunately, findings aren’t always fact-based and can be skewed, intentionally or not. Premises, like their conclusions, may be questionable. What is the risk that reports that dazzle with brilliance disguise attempts to baffle with bull----? Pretty high, when they come from gun control advocates. Some examples: (more…)

Americans, owing to their freedom-seeking history, are less comfortable than most people with giving government a hand in managing their private lives. Perhaps that’s why the international panel of editors of the BMJ (British Medical Journal)-owned journal Injury Prevention saw no problem with helping some New York City and Boston anti-gun advocacy researchers hype a new meme—attacking the very culture of American gun owners. It’s not really a new technique. Public health gun prohibitioni...

Have you had the experience of going to your doctor for a particular problem, let’s say headaches, and been surprised by the doctor asking you about a completely unrelated subject—whether you have a gun in your home? It’s no accident that doctors’ or health plans’ questions about guns in your home have become routine. In the 1980s and 1990s medical professional organizations declared a culture war on gun ownership in America. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) developed an official poli...

The horror of a delusional murderer suddenly killing 9 people who had welcomed him into their Bible study the evening of June 17 is unimaginable. The misuse of this tragedy to beat the drums of commentators’ biases and agendas is all too recognizable. Those good, doomed people of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina seem to have been among the best humanity offers. Some of them, including their overworked pastor, stayed late to hold their regular Bible study. An awkward, perha...

Memories are short. The constant flood of global news pouring from the internet, blessing though it may be, hasn’t helped the public sort the gold from the garbage. Let’s remember all the way back to last week, when numerous news outlets gave the Violence Policy Center (VPC) some entirely undeserved coverage for disinterring and dusting off a manufactured controversy about defensive gun uses (DGUs) that was laid to rest eighteen years ago. If today’s fresh-faced reporters knew anything ab...