My latest piece at the Daily Caller: "Hillary Clinton Locks Up The Gun-Grabber Vote"

My newest piece at the Daily Caller starts this way:

On Thursday night, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence honored Hillary Clinton with the first ever Cuomo Visionary Award, named after the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo. The Brady Center gave her the award because“she has demonstrated a clear commitment in support of our efforts to ‘finish the job’” for the gun control and, “there is nobody who has done more to lead us there than Hillary Clinton.”
Clinton has surely fought for this recognition, making gun control a central issue of her 2016 presidential campaign. She has named the NRA as one of her biggest enemies. But the regulations she is pushing will disarm millions of Americans and primarily take guns away from poor blacks.
Her big focus is on enacting “universal” background checks, expanding checks to the private transfer of guns, with the vast majority of transfers occurring within families. In New York, where Hillary Clinton was being honored by the Brady Campaign, expanded background checks add about $80 to the cost of transferring a gun.
The cost imposed on gun transfers in other places have ranged from $60 in Oregon to $200 in Washington, DC. Drug gangs aren’t going to be paying these fees. It is the law-abiding good citizens who will go through these background checks who do.
For poor people, these taxes and fees represent a real increase in the cost of obtaining a gun and they make a big difference in how many people get guns.
That’s too bad. Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but they can’t be there all the time. There is little doubt that the people who are most likely to be victims of violent crime – again, overwhelmingly poor blacks in urban areas — are also the ones who benefit the most from owning guns and having the option to protect themselves. Research, including my own, has demonstrated this.
Nor is there any evidence that background checks or these universal checks reduce violent crime. Just as it is very difficult to stop drug gangs from getting illegal drugs, it has proven very difficult to stop gangs from getting access to guns. Even gun bans for whole countries have only seen murder rates rise.
Clinton also wants to end right-to-carry laws that let 13 million Americans carry concealed handguns for protection. But, again, it is poor blacks who benefit the most and the academic evidence overwhelmingly shows that these laws reduce crime, with no one arguing that they increase murder, rape or robbery rates.
If you don’t believe that these fees can make a difference, take the case of getting concealed handgun permits in Pennsylvania and Texas. Texas may have twice Pennsylvania’s adult population, but Texas still has over 20 percent fewer concealed handgun permits. It isn’t that Texans like guns less than Pennsylvanians. It just costs $140 to get a permit in Texas and only $19 in Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, Clinton isn’t the only Democrat who wants to disarm poor blacks. In 2013, when Colorado passed a bill that would charge people a fee when they purchase a gun, Democrats voted down a Republican amendment that would have exempted people below the poverty level from paying a state tax on gun transfers.
In Maryland that same year, Democrats also refused to exempt people below the poverty level from fees for their new gun licensing proposal — a total cost coming to $300. Do Democrats seriously think that poor people are going to be able to afford these costs?
All one needs to do is look at the places in the U.S. with the strictest gun control regulations to see what happens to gun ownership by poor people. In New York City, only about three thousand people have concealed handgun permits, but if you aren’t a head of a labor union, a famous actor like Robert De Niro, a powerful media mogul like New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, or very wealthy businessmen like Donald Trump, you aren’t going to get a permit. Poor blacks, who live in Harlem, need not apply, even if they face much greater risks from crime.
Hillary Clinton and other Democrats want poor minorities’ votes, they just won’t let them be able to defend themselves. Apparently, they believe that the right to self-defense is something that only belongs to the wealthy.
John Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

My newest piece in the Daily Caller: Misinformation about Terror Watch List and the ability to buy guns

My latest piece in the Daily Caller starts this way (originally titled: "Does George Stephanopoulos Even Know What Gun Laws We Have Now?"):

Do gun control advocates even read what gun laws are on the books?  The hot new claim is that there’s nothing to stop identified terrorists from buying guns in this country.
On Sunday, on ABC’s “The Week,” George Stephanopoulos asserted that, “Under current law, individuals on the terror watch list and the no-fly list have been allowed to buy guns and explosives.”  That same day, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton got on “Meet the Press” and asked Congress to “help us out with that Terrorist Watch List, those thousands of people that can purchase firearms in this country.” Chuck Todd then pressed Ohio Governor John Kasich on whether he would protect Americans by following Bratton’s advice.
It sure sounds scary.
But Bratton surely knows better. Law enforcement is notified every time that a person on the terror watch list attempts to buy gun. If it raises other flags, that case may be further scrutinized.
Being on the watch list doesn’t mean that you are guilty of anything. You can be on the list simply because the FBI wants to interview you about someone you might know. About 300,000 people on the watch list are under “reasonable suspicion” even though they have “no affiliation with known terrorist groups.”
Being on the watch list doesn’t mean that you have been arrested, prosecuted, or convicted of a crime. Of over 2,000 people on the watch list that bought guns between February 2004 and December 2014, not a single one has been identified as using a gun in a crime.
It is pretty easy to get on the terrorist watch list even if you haven’t done anything wrong. About 700,000 people were on the watch list last year, and this number has grown dramatically during the Obama administration. In 2014, about 50,000 people were on the “no-fly” list. This is a 10-fold increase since the beginning of 2009. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At least 40 School Districts in Ohio allow Teachers to Carry Permitted Concealed Handguns

WKRC-TV Channel 12 in Cincinnati reports:

. . . In Ohio, around 40 school districts now allow teachers with concealed carry licenses to carry their weapons in class. In upstate Ohio there is top level, extraordinary teacher training.
The teachers and administrators train side by side with local law enforcement and paramedics at John Benner’s Tactical Defense Institute. They're training for a nightmare, when classrooms and hallways become killing fields. . . .
Parents in a district asked that their staff be armed. The board OK'd the training and the carrying of weapons on campus by trained staff. . . . .
The instructors are from John Benner's Tactical Defense Institute in Adams County, Ohio . . . .  Benner himself is a former SWAT commander.
He said, “We've believed in this for a long time, but never thought we'd be able to pull it off until Sandy Hook. And then everything changed. Now people realize if you don't have somebody in the school that's armed willing and capable you're gonna lose a lot of people.”
The cost of training is entirely covered by the Buckeye Firearms Foundation, a pro-gun organization.
Joe Eaton of Buckeye said, “There are teachers who are willing to die for the children we leave with them every day. When they come to us and say we need a solution, we need something that will happen. When we have experts that can provide the training to provide these solutions our foundation is obligated to make this happen for the schools.” . . .

Some interesting information from Utah, where teachers across the entire state are allowed to carry at school.  Utah definitely does this right as Utah law prevents districts from asking the teachers that have guns.

Even DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier says Civilians Should Shoot Mass Public Shooters "Before Police Can Get There"

DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier on 60 Minutes about active shooters --   "If you're in a position to try to take the gunman out, it's the best option for saving lives before police can get there."  Yet, according to Emily Miller, the chief investigative reporter for Fox News Channel 5 in DC, DC has only granted 45 concealed handgun permits.