Greg Gutfeld gives a shoutout on The Five to my research

The text of Gutfeld's monologue is available here. Greg's discussion about our work is at 4:35 into the video.

At about 3:00 into the video, Juan William claims that “half of killings are done by families,” it is completely wrong. In the latest year the data is available, 2013, if you add up murders involving Husband, Wife, Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, Brother, or Sister, you get a total of 1,419. That same year there were 12,253 murders. So rather than 50%, we are talking about 11.5%. If you include "other relatives," including up to cousins twice removed, you can get the percent up to 13.6%.

Juan’s claim has been something that gun control advocates have pushed to make people afraid of those that they know having guns. What people should really be worried about is relatives who have violent criminal records. 90% of adult murderers have an adult violent criminal record.

Newest piece in the Pittsburg Tribune Review: Comments on FBI Director James Comey's recent speech on police and race

My newest piece in the starts this way:

FBI Director James Comey's recent speech on police and race was about as politically incorrect a speech as you will get these days from a high-ranking government official. Comey acknowledges “the existence of unconscious (racial) bias,” but he doesn't think that racism is responsible for so many blacks being in jail.
Unlike President Obama, he doesn't see a need to change the way police are trained. Comey recognizes that there are real problems, but he believes they arise from drugs, underperforming schools and unemployment.
Comey's comments are at odds with what blacks are telling pollsters. Compared with other Americans, blacks were 29 percent more likely to primarily attribute the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks to racial discrimination. Blacks are much more likely to say that police treat blacks less fairly than whites. And blacks are also more likely to believe that the police are dishonest. . . .
There is actually strong evidence that blacks trust police at least as much as whites do. What people say and what they do are often very different. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

Newest Fox News piece: Police are extremely Law-abiding, but concealed handgun permit holders are even more so

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

. . . Gun control advocates just can’t accept the fact that concealed handgun permit holders are incredibly law-abiding.  The New York Times’ recent attack on permit holders is typical.  It is filled with triple-counting of legitimate self-defense cases. Murders or suicides by permit holders are blamed on guns, even when no gun was involved.  In point of fact, permit holders are incredibly law-abiding.  Some new evidence puts things in perspective. 

Police are the single most important factor for reducing crime, but even police commit crimes on very rare occasions.  Even more law-abiding than police, however, are permit holders. 

According to a study in Police Quarterly, the period from January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2007 saw an average of 703 crimes by police per year. 113 of these involved firearms violations.  This is likely to be an underestimate since not all police crimes receive media coverage. The authors of the study may also have missed some media reports. 

So how law-abiding are police?  With about 570,000 full-time police officers in the US at that time, that translates into about 124 crimes by police per hundred thousand officers.  For the US population as a whole over those years, the crime rate was 31 times higher -- 3,813 per hundred thousand people. 

Perhaps police crimes are underreported due to leniency from fellow officers, but the gap between police and the general citizenry is so vast that this couldn’t account for more than a small fraction of the difference. 

Concealed carry permit holders are even more law-abiding.  Between October 1, 1987 and January 31, 2015, Florida revoked 9,366 concealed handgun permits for misdemeanors or felonies. This is an annual rate of 12.5 per 100,000 permit holders -- a mere tenth of the rate at which officers commit misdemeanors and felonies. In Texas in 2012, the last year the data is available, 120 permit holders were convicted of misdemeanors or felonies – a rate of 20.5 per 100,000, still just a sixth of the rate for police. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

Newest Chicago Tribune piece: "Take a gun to the mall"

My newest piece at the Chicago Tribune starts this way:

Over the weekend Somali terrorists threatened to attack the Mall of America in Minnesota. They called for a massacre similar to the 2013 Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed and injured scores of people. With the large Somali population in the Twin Cities area, the threat is hard to ignore. 

On Sunday, when asked a couple of times if Americans should still go to the mall, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson would only say: "I'm not telling people to not go to the mall."
Unfortunately, Americans have learned little from terrorist attacks like this. Mall of America officials think that by posting signs banning permitted concealed handguns that they are making the mall safer. They seem to believe that terrorists will obey these signs. 

Right after the Kenya attack, Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol, which is a world version of the FBI and headquartered in Lyon, France, noted two means of protecting people from mass shootings. "One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves (should be) so secure that in order to get into the soft target, you're going to have to pass through extraordinary security."

But Noble warned that his experience taught him that it was virtually impossible to stop killers from getting weapons and that "you can't have armed police forces everywhere." 

"It makes citizens question their views on gun control," he noted. "You have to ask yourself, 'Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past, with an evolving threat of terrorism?'" . . .

The rest of the piece is available here (sign-in required, but no fee is required).