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Sports broadcaster Bob Costas used his platform at NBC’s Sunday Night Football to blame guns for Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher’s murder of his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and Belcher’s subsequent suicide. Costas quoted extensively from a column written by Fox News sportswriter Jason Whitlock, in which Whitlock concludes, without equivocation: What I believe is, if he [Belcher] didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today. Never mind the fact that their relationship was so troubled that the KC Chiefs team management was providing counseling to them. And never mind the fact that Belcher had...

(GunAuction) -- John Lott, writing on this personal blog johnrlott.blogspot.com, commented that there has been a lot of discussion about Australia's gun control laws. He cites a piece at the Huffington Post. A decade-long examination of the program in the journal "Injury Prevention" concluded that "chances of gun death in Australia dropped twice as steeply" after the program was implemented. A study by Harvard University in the Spring of 2011 suggested that the program helped reduce, either causally or directly, firearm deaths, gun-related suicides and accidental shootings. The Washington Post, summarizing many of the studies, concluded that there was "strong...

With 12 dead and 58 wounded, the July 20th shooting at the Cinemark Century 16 Theater in Aurora, Colorado was sure to result in a lawsuit. On Friday, the first suit was announced, claiming Cinemark has “primary responsibility.” The theater did have responsibility for the attack, but not for the reasons that the lawyers bringing the case think. The lawyer bringing the suit, Attorney Marc Bern, with the New York city law firm of Napoli, Bern, Ripka and Scholonik, suggested the theater should have had security guards the night of the attack. Yet, checking bags or metal detectors at the...

CDC data show number of accidental firearm deaths for children under age 15 has gone back up to 62, a number that it was at in 2008. The 48 accidental deaths in 2009 was unusually low. A similar pattern also held for total accidental gun deaths for all ages: 2008, 592; 2009, 554; and 2010, 606. However, over the longer term, the pattern for accidental gun deaths is similar to other accidental deaths in that is as long as we have data you see a gradual decline, though in recent years the decline in accidental firearm deaths has slowed.

Friday’s horrible shooting in Colorado occurred in yet another place where guns are banned. And that’s consistent with a trend: With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. The Cinemark movie theater in Aurora, like others run by the chain around the country, displayed warning signs that it was illegal to carry guns into the theater.

I have been interviewed by Howard Stern, and I thought that was pretty strange. This interview was even more bizarre. Mediaite has the entire 16 minute video available here. How does Mediaite describe the interview: Morgan kept grilling Lott over his premise that gun control will not help stem violence, and that having more guns out there will lead to less crime. Lott tried to rebut the points Dershowitz and Morgan were making, but Morgan repeatedly interrupted him to get Lott to answer his questions and telling Lott that he was spouting “nonsense.” Lott tried to explain the difference between...

Americans faced another disappointing jobs picture today. Of course, we could go through the numbers again. With the working age population growing by 191,000 last month, 80,000 more jobs doesn’t even come close to absorbing all these new workers, let alone employing those who have long been out of work. And then there’s the most important number of all: for 41 months, the unemployment rate has been above 8 percent. But how does the US labor market compare to Europe or the rest of the world? Earlier this week news reports may have made Americans feel a little better, if...

People died. It is something to remember during today’s historic House vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt. Never before has a sitting attorney general been held in contempt. With all the hoopla over past scandals from Watergate to Filegate to Pardongate, the cover up was always worse than the crime. Yet, in "Fast and Furious," the guns that the US government supplied to Mexican drug gangs have been used to kill one American border agent and over 300 Mexican citizens and commit numerous other crimes. To date, because of administration stonewalling, we don't have answers to the...

In case you missed it, hiring fell a staggering 9 percent last month. The hidden secret is how bad hiring has been throughout the “recovery.” Economists say the recovery started in July 2009 — but the jobs picture still looks more like a recession. New hires not only fell during the recession, they’ve kept on falling during the “recovery” — something that isn’t supposed to happen. The economy has added jobs for 20 months, but very slowly. The total number of jobs has grown by just 1 percent during the 36-month “recovery.” In all past recoveries since 1970, the average...

John R. Lott Jr. and Grover G. Norquist are the authors of Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future. Lott, a former colleague of the president’s at the University of Chicago Law School, answers some questions about the depth of the debacle and the way out from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: John, you say that when you were a faculty colleague of Barack Obama, he tagged you as “the gun guy” and announced that “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” That...

John R. Lott Jr. and Grover G. Norquist are the authors of Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future. Lott, a former colleague of the president’s at the University of Chicago Law School, answers some questions about the depth of the debacle and the way out from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: John, you say that when you were a faculty colleague of Barack Obama, he tagged you as “the gun guy” and announced that “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.” That...

With the House committee voting Wednesday to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, the stalemate between the Obama administration and Congress ultimately boils down to about 1,300 documents. Congress wants to know who prepared a February 4, 2011 letter where the Obama administration claimed that the U.S. did not knowingly help smuggle guns to Mexico (so-called “gun walking”), including the gun used to kill US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The Obama administration admits the letter was in error, but they have always maintained that the knowledge of these tactics did not reach the top political appointees in the...

Americans’ patience is running thin. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 40 months. Since the recovery started, over 7.2 million Americans have given up looking for work and left the labor force. It is during recessions, not recoveries, that people are supposed to give up looking for work. But it is obviously all Bush’s fault. At least, that is President Obama’s new take. During his big economic address on Thursday, Obama repeatedly said that the economic problems we face today were “a decade in the making.” But there is a problem with Obama’s logic. Over the last three-and-a-half years,...

“The private sector is doing fine. Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government,” President Obama claimed on Friday. His solution to fix the public sector was more government spending. When people started screaming, Obama clarified his remarks and said “It’s absolutely clear economy is not doing fine,” but he just couldn’t bring himself to disown his statement about the private sector generally doing “fine.” His clarification still asserted that there is “good momentum in the private sector.” But private sector employment growth has fallen in each of the last four months, reaching...

On August 8th, Students for Concealed Carry are supposed to have a national convention in DC. The main liaison for the group dropped the ball and didn't do his job coordinating things. As a result, the convention is in desperate need to get a lot more bodies at the convention than we are currently looking to get. We should have at least 100 and we are at only about 40, and I am not completely sure that is for certain. Are there any college age or 20-something or even 30 something people who you know who could attend? At this...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to ban sugary soft drinks larger than 16 ounces. He believes that by this measure he can reduce obesity. But plenty of evidence indicates that he will fail. The ban will inconvenience people and waste their time, but it will not make them thinner. Bloomberg didn’t originate this type of idea. Public schools, which hold their students captive for much of their day, have tried a similar approach to making students lose weight. And some have gone further than Bloomberg’s limit on cup size and have banned such drinks completely. But even complete bans haven’t worked....

The new medical reports on the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case tell us a lot. And it is not just for what they find, but also what they don’t find. First, the reports provide striking evidence that Zimmerman did not start the fight with Martin, and that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense. Martin’s injuries were two-fold: broken skin on his knuckles and the fatal gunshot wound. Zimmerman’s injuries involved: a fractured nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury. It takes considerable force to break the skin on multiple knuckles....

Would you hire President Obama as your financial adviser? Three years ago his administration invested more than $100 billion in taxpayer money to bail out General Motors. On Tuesday, the entire company, not just what the government owns, was worth less than $34 billion. By anyone’s definition, that investment is a glaring failure. Yet over the last few days the Obama campaign, in a $25 million marketing blitz, has flooded the airwaves with ads in battleground states, claiming the bailout should be counted a rousing success. Unfortunately, assertions that “all loans have been repaid to the federal government,” that the...

The Bellevue-based Second Amendment Foundation is hosting a forum next Monday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and a highlight of the event – which is held in cooperation with Students for Concealed Carry on Campus – will be a debate between Colin Goddard with the Brady Campaign and economist John Lott, author of More Guns = Less Crime. SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb will be there, along with attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued both of this century’s landmark Second Amendment cases before the Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v....

A video of John Lott being interviewed by Malia Zimmerman. John explains facts about guns and crime.