Online discussion at the Washington Post Today
I just finished a long online discussion at the Washington Post. It was pretty draining to type up the answers to those 22 questions, but I hope that people find the discussion useful. Overall, I thought that the questions were very good. With almost 5,500 words of discussion (the equivalent of about 6 or so op-eds), there is a lot of material there. A link is also provided to an online discussion done by the Brady Campaign on the same issue.
Labels: Commentary, MediaAppearance
posted by John Lott at 2:10 PM
7 Comments:
I read both your on-line chat and the one the Brady representative did. Interesting the way he dodged all the hard questions by deriding them as "NRA talking points," and making other snarky ad hominem remarks. What a contrast with the way you respectfully engaged in discussion with critics, producing hard evidence to support your position.
Would sure be interesting to see you go head-to-head with him, but I doubt he'd ever agree to that.
Dear Anonymous:
Thanks for the comment. It would be nice to debate him, but the last time we debated on NPR I think that I beat him pretty throughly and the Brady Campaign has refused to have anyone else from their organization debate me. The Brady Campaign President was supposed to debate me this spring at a University in Indiana until he was told about the Brady Campaign policy not to debate me.
Congratulations an an outstanding piece of extemporaneous debate.
Excellent reading.
I really liked this WP online discussion. I posted a link here with a longish comment on both your Q&A and the Brady one.
Where did Dennis Henigan get this info? How/where would one verify this?
Dennis Henigan: In 2004, there were 73 gun homicides in England and Wales and 11,344 in the United States. God bless America.
Dear 2nd Anonymous and Scott:
Thanks very much for your comments. Scott, thanks very much for putting up a post discussing the exchanges. It was interesting.
Dear Don:
I would have to look up the exact numbers for the UK (he seems to only include England and not Wales), but I can tell you that he got the US murder with firearms number wrong (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/offense_tabulations/table_20-22.html). Total firearm murder were 9,326. Henigan is off by over 2,000 murders.
The issue with England is that they have always had a low murder rate. Indeed, they had an even lower murder rate relative to the US when they didn't have any gun control. Murder rates have gone up after England passed gun control laws in the 1950s and 1990s.
How would you respond to Henigan's point about total firearm deaths being so much higher in places like Alaska and Montana than elsewhere? I sense another variable lurking in that equation that he's ignoring, or that he's distorting the statistics somehow.
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