Post at the Crime Prevention Research Center: from defensive gun uses to recent media to what is happening in Washington

Here are some recent posts at the Crime Prevention Research Center

-- Permitted concealed handguns stop two kidnappings, in another case holding a killer until police arrive, and other cases

-- Dramatic self-defense by concealed handgun permit holder caught on high definition video

-- On the Dennis Prager Show to talk about the gun control

-- Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) urges Democrats to hide views on gun control because of 2018 elections

-- Will new bipartisan House bill to ban bump stock guns actually ban all semi-auto guns?

Coast to Coast AM listeners, please go to the crimeresearch.org website

If you want to learn about the research on guns and crime, please go to crimeresearch.org.

Visit the Crime Prevention Research Center Website

If you are interested in research on crime and gun control, you will find a lot of original research at the CrimeResearch.org website.  Please visit.

CPRC has new refereed publication in Econ Journal Watch: Explaining a bias in recent studies on right-to-carry laws

The paper can be downloaded here. 

Crime Prevention Research Center has two of the top 5 research papers on "Security and Safety" at the Social Science Research Network

Click on screen shot to enlarge

I hope that people find these two papers of interest and download them to take a look (available here).  The more our research papers move up in rank, the more that it gets other academics to read them and interested in those research topics.  

What are the top ten criminology papers at the Social Science Research Network?

Those interested in downloading the papers can click here.  Getting more downloads to my work forces other academics to deal with these issues.

Highlights from the Crime Prevention Research Center's first Annual Dinner: Brad Thor, Katie Pavlich, Glenn Reynolds, Dana Loesch, Ted Nugent, and John Lott

Recent Media Highlights Video  

Pictures and videos from our talks Brad Thor's Talk -- above picture shows Brad cutting up is Illinois Firearm Owner Identification card Katie Pavlich's Talk
 Glenn Reynolds -- Academic of the Year Award Winner

Dana Loesch's Talk  

 Ted Nugent's Talk  

John Lott's Talk

 Our auction was run by Tennessee State Representative Judd Matheny

 Pictures from the event -- Click on pictures to enlarge
 

Paper on the politicization of the FBI forthcoming in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today, May 2015

The abstract:      

An FBI report released on September 16th, 2014 makes the assertion that active shooter attacks and deaths have increased dramatically since 2000 – both increasing at an annual rate of about 16 percent. As the headline in the Wall Street Journal stated: “Mass Shootings on the Rise, FBI says.” 

But the FBI made a number of subtle and misleading decisions as well as outright errors. Once these biases and mistakes are fixed, the annual growth rate in homicides is cut in half. When a longer period of time is examined (1977 through the first half of 2014), deaths from Mass Public Shootings show only a slight, statistically insignificant, increase – an annual increase of less than one percent. 

The FBI’s misleadingly includes cases that aren’t mass shootings – cases where no one or only one person was killed in a public place. While the FBI assures people that it “captured the vast majority of incidents falling within the search criteria,” their report missed 20 shootings where at least two people were killed in a public place. Most of these missing cases took place early on, biasing their results towards showing an increase.

The paper can be downloaded here. 

CPRC discussed in new Forbes article: “How Bloomberg’s Million-Dollar Desire For Gun Control Is Backfiring”

The article yesterday in Forbes starts this way and is highly recommended:

With the midterms just over a month away New York City’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending at least $50 million to make his gun-control agenda part of this election. His gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety has endorsed more than 100 federal and state candidates. They are also running television commercials, holding events and pushing their studies into the newsrooms of a mostly favorable press.

John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president, told USA Today, “We want gun safety to be an issue that people vote on.” 

John R. Lott, Jr. says he’s fine with that statement. He just wants people to know the truth about what really reduces violence before they vote. He says, “I can’t find a single study from Bloomberg’s groups that aren’t loaded with errors. They have an anti-gun agenda and will lie to achieve it.” 

Before getting to the inside story behind the politics, the piles of money being used to shape public opinion and to how the truth is stubbornly winning the debate despite—or because of—Bloomberg’s spin, I’d like to tell you how I first met John R. Lott, Jr. He is an important voice in this debate and this anecdote shows what kind of researcher he is. . . .

The rest of the article is available here.

Students for Concealed Carry Conference in Washington DC at the National Press Club tomorrow

From the Daily Caller:

Students for Concealed Carry is a national, non-partisan, grassroots organization comprising over 43,000 college students, professors, college employees, parents of college students, and concerned citizens who believe that holders of state-issued concealed handgun licenses should be allowed the same measure of personal protection on college campuses that they enjoy virtually everywhere else. 

The group will hold its third Students for Concealed Carry Conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on August 5, 2014, from 12:00 noon–5:00 p.m. 

The event will feature many distinguished speakers, including author and scholar John R. Lott Jr., a panel of women speaking of their experiences in gun-free zones on college campuses, an academic panel for legal analysis, military and police trainers, and state legislators from across the country. . . .

Newest piece at Fox News: "Chicago violence: The buck stops with you, Rahm Emanuel"

The newest CPRC op-ed at Fox News starts this way:

Over the July 4 weekend, in Chicago alone, 16 people were shot to death and another 66 were wounded.  At a press briefing on July 11, the White House weighed in, stating that Obama would "continue to make the case" that lawmakers should adopt new gun control laws. Two days later, on Sunday, Gov. Pat Quinn also called for more gun control, in particular a state ban on assault weapons, as the solution. 

But Chicago's problems lie with the city’s politicians. Nationally, police solve almost two out of every three murders – 63 percent of them. That figure is much lower in Chicago. In 2010, right before Rahm Emanuel became mayor, the rate for Chicago was 39 percent. But by Emanuel’s second year in office, it had plunged to an official rate of 26 percent. (In reality it is even lower, because Chicago has tried to hide how bad things are by increasingly misclassifying murders as non-murders.) 

After becoming mayor, Emanuel did three unfortunate things to the Chicago police force: 

1) He closed down detective bureaus in Chicago's highest crime districts and moved them elsewhere, sometimes quite far away. 

2) Instead of increasing the number of police officers by 1,000, as he had promised during his campaign, he actually cut the number of police. 

3) He disbanded many gang task forces. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

New Breitbart article on the Crime Prevention Research Center

From the Breitbart article by Kristin Tate:

Breitbart News previously reported that economist John Lott will establish the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), an initiative to produce studies focused on the relationship between firearms and crime. Lott is largely funding CPRC with donations from individuals who support his mission. Just one month after launching CPRC's campaign on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo, Lott has already exceeded $30,000 in donations. The financial success of Lott's campaign suggests that Americans are hungry for accurate information regarding guns and crime, amid a mainstream media that often vilifies firearms and those who own them. The CPRC is currently the most successful campaign in the education section on Indiegogo and has more than double the number of funders than the other trending education campaigns. Lott's project is additionally the third trending campaign in the education section."You spend years trying to work through data to figure out what saves the most lives, and the support that we are receiving is very gratifying," Lott told Breitbart News. "People care about having an objective source that they can trust. The notes that we have received in the mail have really been encouraging." . . .

Save Lives & Deter Criminals -- Help start the Crime Prevention Research Center

More information available here: Crowd funding at Indiegogo.

Fox News: MYTH: FIREARMS RESEARCH FELL AFTER THE NRA RESTRICTIONS ON FEDERAL FUNDING

The CPRC is proud to release a new study available here.

Here is part of a news story on the report from Fox News:

A forthcoming study is challenging claims, repeated over and over in the media, that federal restrictions effectively froze gun research over the last two decades.

The Crime Prevention Research Center study examined how a 1996 decision by Congress to strip funding for firearms research actually impacted the world of academia. To hear national media outlets tell it, the decision led to a drought in research from 1996 to 2013 -- when such funding was once again allowed. Stories from The Washington Post, NBC News, Reuters and other outlets all have claimed that Washington, with the backing of the National Rifle Association, basically banned gun studies during that period.

Far from it, the study claims. “Federal funding declined, but research either remained constant or even increased,” the authors wrote.

The study shows the number of firearms-related journal articles published every year, after hitting 69 in 1996, rarely dipped below 60 and even spiked to 121 last year.

The report challenges not only the media narrative but also the notion that researchers need a constant flow of federal money in order to thrive. . . .