At Townhall: Felons Voting While In Prison In D.C.

Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Townhall on the push in Washington, DC to let felons vote while they are still serving their sentence in prison. The piece starts this way:

Washington, D.C.’s council seems posed to let felons vote while they are still serving their sentences in prison. Surely, that has the benefit of ensuring that these individuals turn out to vote. But one claim made to push the change, that felon disenfranchisement is racist, is absurd. 

Many states have had that rule as long as they have been states, and places such as Vermont in 1793 or later in North and South Dakota can hardly be claimed to have adopted these rules because of concerns about black voters.

Democrats used to argue that once felons had served their time, they had paid their debt to society and should be able to vote. Now, after Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) earlier this year argued for felons to vote while they are in prison, even for those who have committed the most horrible crimes, other Democrats have picked up the cause. 

Other than racism, there is a more straightforward explanation for this prohibition. We learn about murderers and rapists in terms of how they care about their fellow citizens in other ways. The Boston Marathon bomber killed three people and wounded 260 others. How will someone willing to take many lives and maimed or disfigured for life many others vote on issues from law enforcement to health care policy? How will they vote on issues that depend on compassion?

Why is it in the interests of women that rapists should have a say in deciding who will win elections? Sexual offenders aren’t going to support women’s safety and health issues or education the way that other citizens will. Criminals probably shouldn’t be deciding what the laws should be or how they should be enforced.

The rest of the piece is available here.

At Fox News: Anti-Trump media can't handle 'the truth' as it piles on Giuliani comment

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

The anti-Trump media are in an uproar about a comment by President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that “truth isn’t truth.”News reports have taken Giuliani’s comment completely out of context – showing that many in the media really don’t care about the truth.

As part of the media pile-on attacking Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, CNN’s Brian Stelter warned: “For a part of the country’s population, the truth is not the truth anymore. President Trump’s accomplishment has been to destroy the notion of the commonly accepted set of facts. The truth is what the president says that it is.”

Washington Post Opinions Editor James Downie comparedGiuliani’s comment to President Clinton’s statement about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinksy, when Clinton said: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
HBO’s John Oliver gaveonly a glimpse of the late night talk shows will do with the statement this week by poking fun at Giuliani’s statement.
But what was Giuliani really saying?
Here is the exchange between Giuliani and Todd on “Meet the Press.” 

Giuliani: “And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”
Todd: “Truth is truth. I don’t mean to go like – ”
Giuliani: “No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth. The president of the United States says, “I didn’t – ”
Todd: “Truth isn’t truth? Mr. Mayor, do you realize, what, I, I, I —”
Giuliani: “No, no, no –”
Todd: “This is going to become a bad meme.”
Giuliani: “Don’t do, don’t do this to me.”
Todd: “Don’t do truth isn’t truth to me.” 

Giuliani’s point was simple: even if you tell the complete truth, prosecutors can still go after you for perjury. It could be that the prosecutors truly believe some other witness. It could also be that the prosecutors are just hell bent on getting another conviction.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was charged last year with perjury after getting a date wrong in an interview with FBI agents. Flynn wasn’t told the purpose of the interview and hadn’t had a chance to refresh his memory.
The agents who interviewed Flynn didn’t think that he had lied, but merely made a mistake on dates. They found no“physical indications of deception” and “didn't see any change in posture, in tone, in inflection, in eye contact.”
Making a mistake isn’t the same thing as lying. Witnesses to crimes often make mistakes in recalling events that may have happened just minutes or hours previously.
But perjury charges weren’t brought against Flynn until Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election got underway months later in 2017.
Mueller never alleged that Flynn perjured himself in an attempt to cover up some other crime. The hope was simply to get someone in President Trump’s inner circle to crack and divulge evidence against the president.
Mueller’s prosecutors weren’t present at Flynn’s interview and may have no reason to believe that Flynn lied. Indeed, there was not any reason for Flynn to lie, because what he was talking to the agents about didn’t even involve a crime.
When I served as chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, I observed this sort of thing happen many times. Prosecutors often abuse their tremendous power in the belief that the ends justify the means. I had prosecutors tell me that even if the defendant hadn’t committed this particular crime, they were sure that he had committed other ones.
“Meet the Press” panelists congratulated Todd on getting a sound bite that they could run with. They seemed unconcerned with what Giuliani actually meant.
“I think the headline is truth isn't truth,” said PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor. “As soon as he said (it) I thought, ‘Man, Chuck Todd really does these things really well.’"
Former FBI director James Comey ignored Giuliani’s point and quickly chimed in on Twitter: “Truth exists and truth matters. Truth has always been the touchstone of our country’s justice system and political life. People who lie are held accountable.” . . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At Fox News: Here's the real reason Democrats are so scared about Kavanaugh joining the Supreme Court

I have a new piece up at Fox News where about why Democrats are afraid of Judge Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The piece starts this way:

Democrats are getting hysterical about the prospect of Judge Brett Kavanaugh being seated on the Supreme Court. Most of their hyperventilating is nonsense. 

In a desperate attempt to block Kavanaugh’s confirmation by the Senate, the Democrats are making wild claims that abortion would be banned, people would be dying in the streets, and the president would gain immunity from investigation and prosecution if Kavanaugh joins the nation’s highest court.  

Time for a reality check. Let’s all take a deep breath and look at the facts about the judge who President Trump has nominated to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. 

Kavanaugh currently serves on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He’s not some right-wing extremist who would run wild – like the proverbial bull in the china shop – overturning legal precedents, despite what the Democrats claim.

Kavanaugh is dedicated to judging cases based on the evidence and dedicated to following the Constitution as it is written. He is a firm opponent of legislating from the bench to support his ideological views. 

When he accepted President Trump’s nomination to the Supreme Court in televised remarks, Kavanaugh made this crystal clear, saying: “A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law. A judge must interpret statutes as written, and a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.” 

Lower court judges are supposed to follow Supreme Court precedent, whether or not they personally agree with the decision. When judges ignore precedent, it is easy to infer that they are acting on their own political biases. 

However, Kavanaugh has been a consistent follower of precedent while he has been on the D.C. Circuit Court. The appellate court is widely acknowledged to be the nation’s second highest court, just below the Supreme Court. 

While the Supreme Court can overrule its own precedent, Kavanaugh has co-authored a hefty 942-page book on precedent, titled “Law of Judicial Precedent.” The book seeks to formerly describe rules when courts should follow precedent, and it makes clear that jettisoning precedent is not something that Kavanaugh takes lightly. 

For those on the left who insist that Kavanaugh is dangerous because he supposedly won’t follow precedent when it comes to Roe v Wade – the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide – it seems clear that his critics haven’t read the book he co-authored on precedent. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

 

At Fox News: Trump Administration agreement means "This Marks the End of Gun Control"

I have a major piece up at Fox News where he explains how a new Trump Administration agreement means "This Marks the End of Gun Control." The piece starts this way:

The federal government has finally recognized the obvious – that sharing instructions on how to make guns with 3D printers counts as constitutionally protected speech.Despite little fanfare, this is an important victory for First Amendment rights. It also represents a real blow to the increasingly futile cause of gun control.

The U.S. Justice Department announced a legal settlementand its surrender to the First Amendment arguments July 10 made in a case brought by Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed. Wilson, 25, created a ruckus in May 2013 when he announced his successful design of a plastic gun. In just two days, 100,000 copies of the handgun blueprint were downloaded from Wilson’s website.

The most downloads came from Spain, followed by the U.S., Brazil and Germany. The heavy downloading in Spain, Brazil and Germany likely reflected attempts to evade extremely restrictive handgun regulations in those countries.
People are going to download these files whether they're legal or not. As we've seen with movies, file sharing is unstoppable. The most pirated TV program in 2017 was the seventh season of “Game of Thrones,” with well over 10 million illegal downloadsin most weeks.
Within days of the gun file being uploaded, the Obama State Department served Wilson with a letter threatening criminal prosecution for violating federal export controls. Wilson immediately complied with the order, but there was no way to stop further downloading.
Within a week of the initial uploading, the file could be downloaded on the Internet from over 4,000different computers around the world.
The Justice Department’s recent settlement with Wilson is very favorable to him, allowing Wilson to provide the printing instructions “for public release (meaning unlimited distribution) in any form.” The government also compensated $40,000of Wilson’s legal costs.
Someone has just as much right to release the instructions in a computer file as in a book or newspaper article. The groups that submitted argumentson Wilson's behalf were ideologically diverse, ranging from conservative self-defense advocacy groups to the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Anyone with access to a metal 3D printer can make guns functionally and aesthetically indistinguishable from any gun that can be bought in a store. Such metal printers are available for less than $2,000.
How the government will stop people from obtaining these printers isn’t exactly obvious. Proposals to require background checks, mandatory serial numbers and even a registration processfor printers are easily defeated. Even if printers are registered with the government, what is going to stop gangs from stealing them? And the designs for making your own printer have been available on the Internetfor years.
3D printers make the already extremely difficult job of controlling access to guns practically impossible. The government is not going to be able to ban guns, and limits on the size of bullet magazines will be even more laughable than before. Many parts of a gun can be made on very inexpensive, plastic 3D printers or even from simple machine tools. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At Townhall.com: “How Entertainment Shows have become Vehicles for Gun Control Propaganda”

My newest piece is up at Townhall.com on the continuing bias in entertainment television. The piece starts this way:

All of the major television networks use their primetime entertainment shows to push a pro-gun control agenda.  Liberal television executives apparently think that they have the power to change Americans’ attitudes.

Not liking guns has been portrayed as cool for a long time. It is an old theme that dates back to the original 1980s MacGyver series, in which the titular character avoids using guns and expresses his aversion to them. This theme has continued with the current remake.

But the push to sway public opinion really seems to have picked up. This spring on ABC’s “The Crossing,” the sheriff’s young son says, “I don’t like guns” when a deputy suggests he may someday replace his father. The deputy appears discomforted by the exchange.

In NBC’s “Reverie,” main character Mara Kint(Sarah Shahi) is traumatized by the shooting deaths of her sister and niece. The deaths are played repeatedly throughout the show. In the second episode, which aired last month, Kint throws a gun into the ocean and explains that she has had training with guns. When asked why she threw the gun away she says that she “hates guns.” This scene touches on multiple gun control points in just 15 seconds.

It’s a tight race, but NBC might just be the worst network.  It seems to have given out orders for its TV shows to include some anti-gun or pro-gun control mentions.

This April, an episode of “Taken” (Season 2, Episode 11) tried to convey to viewers that gun-free zones work because the criminals obey the bans.

Santana(Jessica Camacho) asks Agent Bryan Mills (Clive Standen), if he is “OK with this whole no-guns thing” as they enter a hospital  Mills replies that it is OK because the gun-free zone means that “bad guys won’t have them either.”

Do viewers really believe that a group of professional killers couldn’t find some way to get guns into a hospital?  Mass public shootings actually almost always occur in gun-free zones. Since 1950, that’s been true of 98 percent of incidents.  This happens precisely because criminals prefer unarmed victims.

In March, the NBC show “Chicago Fire” (Season 6, episode 15) contains ascenewhere stored ammunition catches fire. Bullets fly everywhere, causing firemen to think that a sniper is targeting them. One of them is seriously wounded.

It is hard to believe that anyone would want to have a gun in their home after watching this scene.  But it is complete fiction.  A gun barrel is needed to propel a bullet forward.  Outside of a gun, the gunpowder in a bullet would simply explode in all directions, which wouldn’t generate much speed in any particular direction.

A February episode of NBC’s “The Black List” (Season 5, episode 13) begins with a group of people accusing a gun maker of providing inexpensive guns that “have no value to anyone but criminals.” The gun maker is accused of making sales that “drive up homicide rates,” further increase the demand for his product, and bring in “blood money.”  There is even a dig about how the law protects the gun maker from being sued, to which his only response is that everything he’s doing is perfectly legal. No one mentions that poor people — particularly poor minorities — are the most likely victims of violent crime and rely on inexpensive gunsfor self-defense. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At The Hill: Gun control advocates are hyperventilating over Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination

My latest piece at The Hill is available here:

Gun control advocates are hyperventilating over President Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun rights group, Everytown for Gun Safety, warned: “Judge Kavanaugh has applied an extreme and dangerous interpretation of the Second Amendment when determining whether a law is constitutional, one that does not take into account a law’s impact on public safety.”

Since the Supreme Court’s last gun control case in 2010, the court has turned away at least 15 gun-rights cases, including several challenges to prohibitions on semi-automatic assault rifles and on public carry of firearms. Gun control advocates hoped that the Supreme Court would overturn unfavorable lower court decisions. Some believe that Justice Anthony Kennedy stopped the court from taking these cases, but it could just as easily have been Chief Justice John Roberts, who places considerable weight on building consensus and is willing to put off dealing with contentious issues. Rarely is any information released on who voted to hear these appeals.

Gun control advocates are most upset by a 2011 dissent in which Kavanaugh voted to strike down Washington, D.C.’s ban on most semi-automatic rifles. Two other judges voted to uphold the ban, so Kavanaugh lost the vote.

But it’s easy to read too much into any one case, especially when a judge is simply following precedent set by the Supreme Court — in this case, precedent from the 2008 Heller decision that struck down D.C.’s handgun ban. “As a lower court, however, it is not our role to re-litigate Heller or to bend it in any particular direction,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Our sole job is to faithfully apply Heller and the approach it set forth for analyzing gun bans and regulations.”

Lower court judges are supposed to follow Supreme Court precedent, whether or not they personally agree with the decision. When a judge ignores precedent, it is easy to infer that he is acting on his own political biases. But Kavanaugh has been a consistent follower of precedent while he has been on the D.C. Circuit Court, widely acknowledged to be the nation’s second highest court, just below the Supreme Court.

While the Supreme Court can overrule its own precedent, Kavanaugh has co-authored a hefty 942 page book on the topic titled “Law of Judicial Precedent.” The book seeks to describe rules governing when courts should follow precedent, and it makes clear that jettisoning precedent is not something that he takes lightly.

It’s not as though Kavanaugh took a particularly strong self-defense rights view of Supreme Court precedent: “Heller largely preserved the status quo of gun regulation in the United States. Heller established that traditional and common gun laws in the United States remain constitutionally permissible.”

Kavanaugh showed consistent respect for precedent, but the left insists that he is dangerous because he supposedly won’t follow precedent when it comes to Roe v. Wade. But during his confirmation hearing to the D.C. Circuit Court in 2006, Kavanaugh promised, “I would follow Roe v Wade faithfully and fully.” In language very similar to what he said to justify his decision on D.C.’s rifle ban, Kavanaugh explained that Roe v Wade would be, “Binding precedent of the court. It’s been decided by the Supreme Court.”

Bloomberg’s Everytown is also simply wrong when it says that Kavanaugh “does not take into account a law’s impact on public safety.” For example, on page 33 of his dissent, Kavanaugh compares the safety issues for semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. On pages 42 and 43 he compares the relatively safety aspects of licensing versus registration laws. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At the Daily Caller: What Is The Religion Of Mass Public Shooters?

I have a new op-ed at The Daily Caller on the religious views of those who commit mass public shootings.  The piece starts this way:

After the attack at the Santa Fe High School, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick denounced a loss of faith and religion in society. While the news media puts the lives of these mass public killers under a microscope, collecting any information that can be gleaned about their childhoods from their family and friends and social media history, researchers have ignored the religious views of these killers.
What is most shocking is how few of these killers appear to be religious, let alone Christian. Just 16 percent have any type of religious affiliation at the time of their attacks, with a slight majority of those being Muslims.
Over just over 20 years from the beginning of January 1998 through today, there have been 69 killers committing 66 mass public shootings in the United States where at least four people have been killed. Of those attacks, just four have been identified as Christians, with just three clearly regular churchgoers. With 70 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Christians and over 33 percent going to church at least once a week, those numbers are a long way away from the 48 or 23 we would respectively expect.
These Christians included:
Mitchell Johnson, who was one of two boys who attacked their middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998. Johnson reportedly dreamed as a child of becoming a minister.
Terry Ratzmann, a regular church attendee who shot up his church in Wisconsin in 2005. Ratzmann was a member of a “most extreme of the many offshoots of the Worldwide Church of God,” which is itself well outside of Christian mainstream. Among their beliefs is that “man’s destiny is to become God as God is God.”
Dylann Roof attacked the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. As a kid, Roof went to his Lutheran church’s camp and had participated in many church activities. But besides acknowledging that Roof was still a member of the church, the minister and Roof’s family members refused to answer questions on how often Roof had attended the church or if had been there recently.
Dimitrios Pagourtziskilled 10 people at the Santa Fe High School in Texas this past Friday. Pagourtzis has been a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Five other killers were raised as Christians, but they moved away from the faith as they got older. It gives one an idea of the extreme detail that the media goes into on people’s religious views. For example, Micah Xavier Johnson, who shot the five police officers in Dallas in 2016, according to his parents, lost his faith after serving in Afghanistan. Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was raised as a Christian, but he resented his parents “strong Christian faith.” Any religious involvement during their lives has been of interest in all the news stories on these attacks.
Muslims make up a slightly disproportionately large share of these attacks. Even though they make up less than one percent of the US population, they account for 8.7 percent of these killers (six in total) and more than the number of Christians. This rate is a much lower than what we observe in the world as a whole where Muslims have committed 23 of the 25 worst mass public shootings since 1970 and 42 of the 50 worst attacks. . . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At The Hill Newspaper: Locking guns won't do anything to save lives

Note: At the end of this piece, we have included responses to an attack on Dr. Lott's article.
I have a new piece at The Hill newspaper on the current debate over whether people should lock up the guns in their homes.  The op-ed starts this way:

After Friday'sattack at Santa Fe High School, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick forcefully told people of their “responsibility” to lock up their guns.We all want to do something, but everyone locking up their guns will cost more lives than it saves.

Santa Fe High School had received an award for school safety but it was helpless to stop this latest nightmare. We need to rethink school safety.  Despite this year’s attacks, deaths from school shootings have actually declined over the last few decades. Still, that doesn't take away at all from the seriousness of the problem we face.

Lt. Gov. Patrick was just giving people advice. By contrast, gun control advocates always want to use laws to force their solutions on others. Since the Santa Fe killer apparently took his father’s guns, a number of gun control advocates have proposed to hold parents like him criminally liable; any gun owner would face criminal charges for leaving his gun unlocked or failing to keep it under his immediate possession.

Other shootings have involved guns stolen from parents. In 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza stole his mother’s gun and subsequently killed her.She kept the gun in a safe, so a new law wouldn’t have mattered there. Since 2000, there have been two additional mass public shootings in the U.S. where a juvenile killed at least four people.

Gun control advocates claim that gunlocks will also reduce children’s accidental gun deaths. Unfortunately, the problem is more complicated. Mandating that people lock up their guns can have unintended consequences.

According to my research, published in the Journal of Law and Economics and elsewhere, requiring individuals to lock up their guns in certain states made it more difficult for those people to successfully defend their families. Such laws emboldened criminals to attack more people in their homes; there were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.

That is not particularly surprising given that crime rises when we impede people from protecting themselves. Indeed, every place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increasein murder.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, accidental gunshots nationwide claimed the lives of an average of 59 children annually over the ten years from 2006 to 2015. This is a tragic number, but so too is the much larger number of cases where people aren’t able to protect themselves and their families from criminals.

Even if locking up guns could have prevented all three of the mass shootings since 2000 that were committed by juveniles, that these killers couldn’t have obtained weapons in other ways, there would have been 24 fewer deaths and 16 fewer people who were wounded. One could even add in all of the accidental gun deaths and assume that those would have been prevented, too. But, even then, we are talking about just a fraction of those who die in one yearfrom the mandated safe storage of guns. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

The Hill newspaper ran an op-ed criticizing my piece. Here is a point-by-point response to some of the errors in the Devin Hughes, Beth Roth, and Jen Pauliukonis’ piece in The Hill. The responses are in bold italics.

Lott’s article is riddled with fabrications and falsehoods. For example, he opines that “every place in the world that has banned guns has seen an increase in murder.” Yet Japan is the developed nation that has come closest to completely banning firearms, and it has seen its homicide rate fallmore than 75 percent since it adopted its ban in 1958. While correlation is not causation, Lott’s correlative claim is unmistakably false. Further, a 2013 studyfound that among developed nations, more guns per capita was associated with significantly higher rates of firearm deaths.

Japanese gun control regulations had seen virtually no change for several hundred years.  It is wrong to think that the 1958 law changed anything relevant to this discussion.  For example, the Library of Congress has this summary.

In 1946, the Japanese government issued the Imperial Ordinance Concerning the Prohibition of the Possession of Guns and Other Arms, which banned the possession of firearms and swords by private citizens in principle, though the possession of hunting guns and artistic swords was allowed under license.[12] . . .

The 1950 Order was replaced by the Law Controlling the Possession of Firearms and Swords in 1958.[18]  There were some changes made to the regulations in the 1950 Order, but the general prohibition of possession of guns by civilians was not changed. . . .

As to the claim that developed countries with more guns have higher rates of firearm deaths, this claim depends on biases in how gun ownership is measured or what countries that you define as developed.  The evidence shows that higher gun ownership is associated with fewer homicides or firearm homicides.   Also, purely cross-country comparisons are quite misleading. And contrary to the reference to Japan, every single time that all guns or all handguns have been banned, homicide rates have gone up.

Lott opines that “relatively few accidental gunshots take place in law-abiding, normal homes; most accidental gunshots resulting in the deaths of minors are fired by adult males in their mid-to-late 20s who have criminal histories.” This is an outright fabrication.

“Of the fifty-six accidental gun deaths involving children under ten in 1998 and the thirty-one in 1999, only eight and six respectively were shot by another child or themselves. The same statistic for 1997 was only five.” -- “The Bias Against Guns."
More detailed evidence on these points is also available there.
Lott’s outdated, solitary study claiming that CAP laws increase crime relies extensively on dubious econometric practices. More reliable research reveals that not only does firearm prevalence endanger children, but that strong CAP lawsalso help mitigate this risk and save lives. These laws help reduce both unintentional shootingsand youth firearm suicides.
Despite the criticism that Lott's research on whether gunlock laws increase crime, noneof these studies linked to here look at that relationship.   In addition, the papers that are cited are purely cross-sectional data (the Slate article cites this, and the "strong CAP Laws" study is here).
Other studies not referenced here either don't control for changes in other types of accidental deaths or factors such as pre-existing average differences across jurisdictions.
Finally, Dr. Lott's piece didn't just reference one "outdated solitary study."  He cited two and here is another later refereed publication here (pp. 198-201).

Although Lott correctly notes that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show an average of 59 children are unintentionally shot and killed each year, he fails to disclose that researchers have conclusively revealed that this number is a significant underestimate. The CDC readily admitsthat its estimate is low, so using this number can only be a tactic to minimize these deaths. A 2013 New York Times investigationfound that fewer than half of unintentional shootings of children were recorded as such (often being mislabeled as homicides).

Relying on initial news reports to identify cases is a very poor approach. Often the initial news reports are the only news articles made in these cases.  As Dr. Lott wrote to Michael Luo, the author of the 2013 New York Times report cited here, made many questionable judgment calls. For example, including cases such as a four-year-old supposedly loading a magazine and pulling back the slide before firing it, just shows that the journalists don't know very much about guns. Few children under ten or even twelve have the strength to pull back the slide on a semi-automatic handgun. Coroners also have access to information not publicly available.

the best available empirical data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive reveal there are fewer than 2,100 verified DGUs annually.
For problems with the Gun Violence Archive and their reliance on news coverage and other errors see hereand here.
The piece by Devin Hughes, Beth Roth, and Jen Pauliukonis is available here.

At National Review: Look at the Parkland Killer. We know one cause of mass public shootings, they want to get publicity

I have a new piece at National Review on why mass public shooters commit these horrible crimes.  The piece starts this way:

Ever wonder why mass public shooters commit their horrible crimes? Prosecutors in Broward County, Fla., released on Wednesday the Parkland high-school shooter’s cell-phone videos, in which he bragged, “It will be a big event, and when you see me on the news, you will all know who I am.”

What makes these mass public shooters different from most criminals is that they want glory and fame, and we need to stop giving it to them. The media coverage of these videos also fails to draw any lessons about how we can stop these attacks in the future.

If anyone missed the Parkland killer’s motivation, he repeated it three more times in his video rants, which totaled two minutes and 26 seconds. He tells viewers: “From the wrath of my power they will know who I am,” “with the power of my AR you will all know who I am,” and “you will all know what my name is.” To get this attention, the killer understood that he had to kill a lot of people: “My goal is [to kill] at least 20 people.”

The Parkland killer feels that he benefits from coverage of the attack even if it doesn’t mention his name. The more well-known the attack, the more people will ultimately learn who he is.

Sadly, the Parkland killer is all too typical. Killers like him want to commit suicide and want to do it in a way that will bring them notoriety. This isn’t a motivation just for lone-wolf shootings; we also see it in coordinated terrorist attacks.
The Sandy Hook killer spent two and a half years putting together a report on mass public shootings. Law enforcement described“a sickeningly thorough 7-foot-long, 4-foot-wide spreadsheet with names, body counts, and weapons from previous mass murders and even attempted killings.” One anonymous law-enforcement veteran remarked, “It sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research.” The killer also collected information on media coverage for each killing. He observed that attacks with more deaths received greater media coverage.
The Sandy Hook killer may have been mentally ill, but he clearly knew what he wanted to accomplish and how he was going to do it. CBS Evening News reported that he wanted to killmore people than did Anders Breivik, a Norwegian man who killed 77 people in July 2011. The Connecticut shooter targeted the “nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School because it was the ‘easiest target’ with the ‘largest cluster of people.’”
The Batman movie-theater shooter in Aurora, Colo., was also mentally ill. But William Reid, a state-appointed psychiatrist who performed Holmes’s sanity evaluation, testified that the subject carefully planned every detail to maximize the number of possible victims and get more attention.
Over and over again, these killers are highly driven to realize their goal of more publicity. They invest a lot of time and energy into planning their attacks, often starting a year or two in advance. Mass public shootings have rarely involved less than six months of planning.

It is clear: If you want to stop these attacks, stop giving news coverage to the killers and their crimes.

Unfortunately, you can’t stop this coverage without trampling on First Amendment rights. From time to time, various media outlets will briefly refrain from mentioning a killer’s name. But this is never done on a consistent, systematic basis. The killers know that their names will be in the history books, giving them a sort of immortality that they couldn’t achieve in any other way. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At The Hill: Little evidence to support the efficacy of more gun control

I ave a new piece at The Hill on the push for more gun control laws.  The piece starts this way:

Gun control advocates seem willing to latch onto anything they can use to justify more stringent laws.They were at it again in the wake of the recent Santa Fe High School shooting. In the New York Times last Thursday, Nicholas Kristof pushedfor 10 supposedly “modest” gun control measures.
Everyone wants to do something to stop mass public shootings. And Kristof is right that fewer school doors aren’t the solution. Schools have as many entrances as they do for a reason (such as escaping fires). One door with a metal detector doesn’t mean much if the guard is the first person killed, and lining up a large number of students at one entrance creates an attractive target for killers to attack there.
But we also have to be careful that the gun control laws primarily disarm criminals, not law-abiding citizens. There has to be reasonable evidence that the regulations reduce crime. Let’s take a look at these proposals.
Universal background checks
Two points supposedly support background checks on private transfers of guns. A survey showing that 22 percentof U.S. guns obtained in the last two years were acquired without a background check. But this is mainly a result of inheritances (presumably, mainly within families) and, to a lesser extent, gifts. No evidence is provided that guns acquired through inheritance are commonly used in crime. The survey claims that 16 percent of people bought a gun at a store without undergoing a background check, but this is illegal everywhere in the U.S. It is not a credible claim.
Other surveys show 90 percent of people support these checks. But when these laws were put on the ballots in Nevada and Maine in 2016, they had a hard time breaking 50 percent, despite Michael Bloomberg massively outspending his opponents by 3-to-1 or 6-to-1 margins.
Closing the Charleston Loophole
The shooter who killed nine people at the Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015 was supposedly only able to buy a gun because his background check wasn’t completed within three days. But giving the government more time to complete the background check wouldn’t have made any difference. The killer had been charged recently with illegal drug possession, but never convicted. Being charged with a felony that could result in a prison term of at least two years makes a person ineligible to buy a gun. Yet, the killer was arrested for a misdemeanor drug possession, not a felony, so he faced a maximum prison time of six months.
One problem is incredibly high error ratein the background check system. The vast majority of the people that it stops are stopped mistakenly. Instead of stopping actual felons, it almost always stops people who have similar names to felons. And background checks aren’t cheap. Indeed, they prevent poor people from getting the guns that they need to defend themselves and their families.
Red flag laws
This law would allow people’s guns to be taken away without even the hearing before a judge, something that most states currently require. When people “really” pose a clear danger to themselves or others, they should be confined to a mental health facility. Denying them the right to legally buy a gun isn't a serious response. People can get guns in other ways, and just about as easily as they can buy illegal drugs. And if someone is really a danger, why only take away their guns? Why not also take away other items that can be used as weapons, such as their cars?
Taking guns out of the hands of accused domestic abusers
People convicted of either misdemeanor or felony domestic violence already lose the right to own a gun for the rest of their lives. Men can already do a lot of harm without a gun. Taking away men’s guns based on just an accusation creates a real incentive for misuse. The people who should have guns in these situations are Women, who tend to be weaker physically than men.
Safe storage gun laws
Kristof points to evidence that most people don’t lock up their guns. He believes that requiring individuals to lock up their guns will reduce accidental child gun deaths and teenage suicides. The CDC claimsthat from 2006 to 2015, an average of 59 children under the age of 15 died annually from accidental gunshots.
According to my research, published in the Journal of Law and Economics and elsewhere, accidental gun deaths and suicides among these young people didn’t change.
Gunlock laws in certain states have made it more difficult for people to successfully defend their families. Such laws emboldened criminals to attack more people in their homes; there were 300 more total murders and 4,000 more rapes occurring each year in the states with these laws. Burglaries also rose dramatically.
Make serial numbers harder to file off . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

In The Hill: Background checks on Truck rentals? "The best way for New York to enhance public safety? More guns"

In a new op-ed in The Hill I discuss the debate over what will stop attacks with vehicles, such as the one this week in New York City.  With an attack that had been planned for over a year, the notion that you are going to be able to keep a killer like Sayfullo Saipov from renting a vehicle just isn't serious.  Here is the beginning of my piece.

On terrorism, we often are fighting the last war. And sometimes the supposed solutions have nothing to do with preventing future attacks. They just give the appearance that politicians are doing something. 

The terror attack on Tuesday in New York City left eight dead and eleven injured after a rental truck was used to plow down people on a bike path. We are just fortunate that the killer ran into a school bus and was unable to continue his plan to hit more pedestrians on the Brooklyn Bridge. 

The NYPD immediately pointed out that it had repeatedly instructed the 148 truck rental businesses in the area on how to identify suspicious customers. 

But the businesses faced an impossible task. Politically correct politicians want businesses to screen for dangerous people, but those same politicians would be the first to object to anything that remotely smacks of racial profiling. 

Take Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-N.Y.) public address a few hours after the attack. He avoided mentioning anything that might usefully identify such an attacker, saying only that those who target New York oppose “freedom and democracy.” He refused to mention radical Islam. And he implicitly criticized President Trump for wanting to screen people from countries where we have trouble even confirming a person’s identity. 

This might be only the first successful mass killing with a vehicle in the US, but it is more common in other countries. Muslims only account for six percent of Europe’s population, but they are responsible for over 80 percent of vehicle attacks in Europe since 2000. Twenty-four percent of the people in the world are Muslims, but they carry out 78 percent of the world’s vehicular terror attacks. 

Telling truck or car rental companies to screen for suspicious people isn’t a serious counter-terror measure. Even an explicit criminal background check wouldn't have stopped the killer, Sayfullo Saipov, from renting a car. Are rental companies supposed to succeed where these checks would fail? 

In any case, why stop at just rental companies? Saipov already had a car. Even if he didn’t have a car or a truck, couldn’t he buy one? Saipov just needed enough money to put down the initial deposit. It’s not as though he was planning on being around to make the payments. This guy pretty clearly wanted to commit “suicide by cop.” Flashing his pellet gun at the police, he must have known that they’d have no choice but to shoot. 

What happens if someone like Saipov buys a truck from a private individual? Are we going to have so-called universal background checks on private transfers of vehicles between individuals? It’d be a lot of trouble and expense, and it wouldn't save lives.
Cuomo and Mayor Bill De Blasio’s solution to these attacks is “more police 

everywhere.” Police are extremely important, but they can’t guard every inch of New York City and be instantly present to stop an attack. There are just too many targets, not to mention too many crowded sidewalks and bike paths. 

Cuomo, De Blasio and many others even used the truck attack to push more gun control laws. Nicholas Kristof, a columnist at the New York Times, talked about an assault weapon ban. Cuomo and De Blasio lauded New York’s gun control laws. But with the killer planning the attack, politicians need to realize that stopping determined killers from getting weapons is an almost impossible task. 

The question is what do we do when we can’t stop killers from getting weapons. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At National Review: "The Gun-Ban Fetish: Banning guns invariably leads to an increase in the murder rate"

I have a new op-ed at National Review responding to Bret Stephen column in the New York Times that calls for repealing the Second Amendment.  His piece starts this way:

Is support for gun ownership and the Second Amendment a “fetish”? Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist, sure thinks so. 

Stephens acknowledges the “feckless” gun-control laws that keep being trotted out before we even know the facts of each case. (Indeed, as with universal background checks on private gun transfers, we keep finding out that they would not have stopped any of these attacks.) So his solution is to “repeal the Second Amendment,” because gun ownership doesn’t “need a blanket Constitutional protection.” 

He says he doesn’t want to ban guns, but according to the Supreme Court, the only protection that is so far given by the Second Amendment is that the government can’t completely ban all guns, or all handguns. So whatever Stephens’s intentions may be, cities such as Washington and Chicago would again try to ban guns. And California’s handgun-safety regulations, which currently allow only a dozen models to be sold, will continue on their path to banning handguns completely. 

Here’s one problem with this argument: A ban on guns, even in cities like Washington and Chicago, will make things much worse. While gun bans (either a ban on all guns or on all handguns) have been imposed in many places, every time guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up. 

One would think that one time, just out of simple randomness, murder rates would have gone down or at least stayed the same. Yet in every single case for which we have crime data both before and after the ban, murder rates have gone up, often by huge amounts.
Americans, including Stephens, should be familiar with the disasters that befell Washington and Chicago after their gun bans. After Washington’s ban, the city ranked No. 1 or 2 in murder rate among the 50 largest cities for half of the next 30 years, and in the top four for two-thirds of that time. Before the ban, Washington had never been near that high. Chicago’s murder rate relative to other cities also soared after its ban. 

Gun-control advocates will tell you that Washington and Chicago weren’t fair tests. They will point out that criminals could still get guns in Virginia or Maryland, or in Illinois or Indiana. That is true, but while it might explain why murder rates didn’t fall as promised, it doesn’t explain why murder and violent crime rates went up. After all, criminals could get these same guns before the ban. If it was so obvious to these advocates that the Washington and Chicago experiments were going to be failures, they should have let others in on this secret. 

But even island nations have fared no better. One would think that these would be the ideal experiments. After the U.K. banned handguns in January 1997, their homicide rate rose by 50 percent over the next eight years. It came back down to around its earlier levels only after a 14 percent increase in the number of police. Even more dramatic increases in homicide rates occurred in Jamaica and the Republic of Ireland after their gun bans, with sixfold or sevenfold increases. 

Many will blame drug gangs for the increased violence in all these countries, and that is certainly correct, but the point is that gun bans didn’t stop these gangs from getting guns, any more than we have succeeded in stopping them from getting drugs. Why have murder rates so consistently gone up after bans? While the bans may reduce the supply of guns to criminals to some degree, they most particularly disarm law-abiding citizens, thus making it easier for criminals to commit crimes. 

Stephens cites a 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health as evidence that states with more guns have higher homicide rates. The study he cites is filled with the kind of embarrassing errors that we keep finding in public-health research. Even basic controls that account for differences in crime rates across states are left out. 

The study claims: “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.” But it doesn’t actually look at “gun ownership.” The authors just assume that states with a higher percentage of suicides committed with firearms have more guns. But there are some real problems with that assumption. Whether people use firearm or other methods to commit suicides has a lot to do with factors such as gender, age, and race. For example, there has been a big increase in gun ownership among women, but there has been little increase in guns used in suicides by women. 

Stephens also raises the specter of mass public shootings. But this problem is hardly unique to the U.S. Indeed, despite much stricter gun-control laws around the world, the U.S. is a relatively safe oasis in terms of such attacks compared to the European Union and the rest of the world. If gun bans work, why do we see so many machine-gun attacks in Europe? We have also not had as many bombings and vehicle attacks as the rest of the world. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

In The Hill: "Democrats should embrace FBI background check for voters and gun purchasers alike"

I have a new piece at The Hill

Background checks are required for so many things from getting a job to buying a gun. But despite legitimate concerns about voting by illegal aliens and felons, Democrats become outraged by the mention of checks for voting. 

Last week, in testimony to the President’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, I suggested using the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to screen for ineligible voters. Democrats have long lauded this system, calling it simple, accurate, and in complete harmony with the second amendment right to own guns. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) bragged that the checks are done “without in any way abridging rights.” Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that expanding the system to cover all private transfers of guns would not be “in any way imposing on or impinging on the rights that the Second Amendment guarantees.” 

But literally only a few states currently even try in any way to check whether registered voters are US citizens. In 34 states, felons are not able to vote immediately upon release from prison. Even the states that check people criminal records rely on just records in their own states. 

The NICS checks information from the entire country and looks at more than people’s criminal histories. It also checks on citizenship status. So why not use that information to prevent ineligible people from voting? 

Background checks for gun purchases are costly, running roughly $55 to $175 for checks on private gun transfers. Requiring federally licensed gun dealers to do checks on each individual transfer is somewhat time-consuming. The current NICS system places the entire financial burden on gun buyers. This is unfair to poor people just trying to obtain a gun for self-defense, just as it would be unfair to voters. 

But checks on voters would be a simple and very low-cost process. States would comparing a state’s computer database of voters with NICS. Indeed, many states already regularly compare their list of concealed handgun permit holders to ensure that they are still eligible to carry. Under my proposal, the states would pick up the costs. 

The reaction to using NICS for voting was swift and harsh. “Horrified,” “patently absurd,” and “flabbergasted” were some of the reactions. That it was being proposed just to “suppress” voting. Reporters attacked my qualifications. The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham asserted that except for one unpublished paper, I had not done any other research “on elections or voting.” CNN’s Eric Bradner quoted someone questioning whether I was really “an academic” and that I hadn't written anything about elections in a decade. ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman attacked Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for “falsely” saying I am a “prolific author” in academic publications. 

But I have published 19 peer-reviewed, academic articles on the issues of elections, voting, and election law. My most recent is from 2014. I also served as a statistical expert for USA Today on the 2000 presidential election, wrote the Statistical Report on that election for the Minority members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and testified before the US Senate on election issues. In total, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and I have held academic positions at the Wharton Business School, University of Chicago, and Yale. 

Salon’s Heather Parton argued that I am disqualified from the discussion because I usually study “gun violence on behalf of the NRA.” But the NRA has never paid for my research. 

Most of the responses have been personal in nature. But there have also been some more substantive comments. 

A Kansas City Star editorial raised the concern that . . .

The rest of the piece is available here. 

At The Hill: "Democrats must denounce the rise in harassment against Republicans"

I have a new opinion piece at The Hill newspaper on the union-backed disruptions of congressional Republicans.  The title used by The Hill says "Democrats must denounce the rise in violence against Republicans," but that isn't exactly what the op-ed piece says.  The article starts this way:

As masked leftists use clubs to shut down free speech at Berkeley and elsewhere, Democrats have unfortunately been reticent to condemn the activity. But Antifa violence is not the only kind of condemnable disruptive activity. Democrats should also disavow the organized campaign to harass Republican congressmen and stop Republican town halls. 

One group in the thick of this battle is “Indivisible.” The group was founded by a former staffer for Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, and its COO, Matt Traidi, is the research coordinator for the Service Employees International Union. Indivisible provides these instructions on how to prevent other town hall attendees from asking questions: “Don’t give up the mic until you’re satisfied with the answer. If you’ve asked a hostile question … keep a firm hold on the mic. No staffer in their right mind wants to look like they’re physically intimidating a constituent, so they will back off.” 

Not content to interfere with town halls, Indivisible has also gone to the homes of Republican congressmen. They have targeted swing districts such as those of Rep. John Faso (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif). About 200 protesters showed up at Issa's home to harass him for not holding town hall meetings. 

But Indivisible isn’t the only organization causing problems. TakeActionMN showed up at Rep. Jason Lewis’ (R-Minn.) house during the August recess. “It’s gotten so bad that unruly protestors recently invaded my family’s home and personal property, frightening neighbors who then called the local police," Lewis told me. "The group [that] organized the trespass has not only refused to apologize, but hasn't ruled out doing it again.” 

Indivisible plans to disrupt town halls and then go to Republican congressmen’s homes and offices to protest the lack of town halls. “This is a well-oiled, very much activist plan to disrupt the democratic process,” Lewis said. “I have a responsibility to serve the 2nd district to the best of my ability. I don't have a responsibility to host — at taxpayer expense — a Democrat campaign rally just because hyper-partisan opponents call it a "town hall." 

And one can easily see the impact. While 92 percent of Democrats in the House have had Town Halls this year, only 54 percent of Republicans have. While Democrats have held more Town Halls this year than last year, the number for Republicans fell by 54 percent. Many Republicans who held August events faced disruptions from Indivisible, even those in safe districts in such states as North Carolina, Utah, and West Virginia. 

It’s understandable that Democrats don’t want to criticize the tactics of Indivisible or the Service Employees International Union. Over two years from 2015 to 2016, the Service Employees International Union’s PAC spento ver $55 million helping candidates, and 100 percent of their contributions to federal candidates went to Democrats. 

The threats to congressmen’s offices have become of sufficient concern that the Capitol police have reissued guidelines for all members of Congress. Indivisible disrupts California Congressman Ed Royce’s office once a week. 

While some in the media have tried unsuccessfully to get Democratic politicians to disavow Antifa, questions about Indivisible and the Service Employees International Union seem to be off-limits. The tea party never did anything like this. Do Democrats want Republicans showing up at their homes and harassing their families the next time they control the government? . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

In the Kansas City Star: "Look at facts in the campus firearm debate"

I have an op-ed in the Kansas City Star on the debate of permitted concealed handguns on college campuses.  The piece starts this way:

As college classes start up in Kansas this fall, it’s a good time to take stock of the rise in the number of schools where people can carry guns for protection. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 11 states now mandate that concealed handgun permit holders be allowed to carry on public college campuses. There are 12 states if we count Michigan, which only allows permit holders to carry if they do so openly. Twenty-three other states leave the decision up to individual colleges. 

Gun control advocates in Kansas predict disaster, just as they have in each new state that adopted campus carry. Unable to point to any actual catastrophes, opponents do their best to imagine what might go wrong. 

But at school after school, no problems have occurred. Over the decades, not a single permit holder who was allowed to carry on university property has committed a crime with his gun. No permit holder has ever gotten angry over a grade and started shooting. As far as we know, no permit holder has ever used his gun to threaten anyone on campus. There have only been six accidental discharges, all of which involved minor injuries. In no case did someone other than the permit holder get a hold of the gun.

Of course, the media loves giving national attention to professors who do silly things, such as resigning from their jobs in protest or wearing protective body armor to teach classes.

Professor Kevin Willmott is worried that the University of Kansas will become a “war zone” now that it has started allowing campus carry. He has promised to wear body armor throughout the entire school year as “a constant reminder to all of us that our students could have a gun, and in an emergency, this could make a bad situation even worse.” Texas community colleges have also just started with campus carry, and San Antonio College Professor Charles K. Smith is also wearing body armor, claiming that the policy “increases the chances of something [bad] happening.” 

In May, associate history professor Jacob Dorman resigned from the University of Kansas. He accepted another tenured position at a public university in a non-campus-carry state. In his resignation letter, Dorman predicted that Kansas would be “driving off faculty members.” 

Dorman also claims that “arming students has done nothing to quell active shooter situations because students do not have the training to effectively combat shooters.” My research has found numerous instances of concealed handgun permit holders with no more training stopping dozens public shootings. 

Willmott and Dorman are only two out of 2,600 faculty members at the University of Kansas. Likewise, just two of 20,322 have left the University of Texas System on account of campus carry. One of those, a visiting retired professor, would likely have left anyway. And the body-armor-wearing Charles Smith is just one out of over 43,000 faculty in the Texas community college system. 

Kansas professors have had several years’ notice that the policy would take effect — plenty of time to look for other jobs. 

It is a wonder how these professors ever go off-campus. After all, there are over 1.15 million concealed handgun permit holders in Texas. Kansans don’t even need permits to carry. Professors can’t go to restaurants, movie theaters, or grocery stores without being around legally-carried concealed handguns. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At Fox News: "Concussions occur in soccer and other sports, too -- but yeah, let's go after all-American football"

With all the commotion over Ed Cunningham's resignation from ESPN this last week, the media is solely focused on concussions in football.  While this involves legal violence, not crime, the piece still illustrates how media does a very poor job of informing people about what is happening.  The piece starts this way:

Did you know who Ed Cunningham is? Probably not. Cunningham, a college football analyst for ESPN, was unknown to all but hardcore football fans. But by tying himself closely to a politically correct cause – in this case, resigning his position Wednesday, in a protest over concussions in football – he is guaranteed fawning media coverage.  The New York Times is leading the Cunningham canonization. 

With the new college football season for most teams starting this weekend, the resignation seems timed for maximum attention.  But the politically correct movement seems much more focused on opposing what is uniquely American than where players actually face the greatest risks of concussion. 

In college, women's soccer has a higher rate of concussions than men's football or soccer: 6.3 per 10,000 times women participate in soccer practice or a game versus 4.9 for men's soccer and 6.1 for men's football. Men's wrestling and hockey have even higher rates at 12.4 and 8.4 respectively. 

But concussions aren't the only problem. In total injuries, both men's and women's soccer exceed those of men's football. Total injuries for men's soccer are 11.14 per 10,000 practices or games and 9.7 for women's soccer. For football, the number is 9.5. 

College sports are about twice as likely as high school sports to result in concussions. At the high school level, the numbers for soccer aren't quite as bad as for football. High school football is the riskiest. But girls' and boys' soccer are still the second and third most dangerous sports for concussions, followed closely by girls' basketball. 

There is also data showing that, while football causes a higher number of concussions, girls and boys' high school soccer is responsible for more of the serious concussions. We can tell that from the recovery time. Concussions from soccer are about twice as likely as football to require 22 or more days of recovery. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

At Fox News: "Police and military equipment - overturning Obama ban protects Americans and law enforcement"

I have a new piece up at Fox News on the Trump administration's decision to overturn Obama's ban on used military equipment being given to police.  The piece starts this way:

Police have a tough and dangerous job.  Armored military vehicles and military-grade body armor aren’t just useful for soldiers, they make it possible for police to protect Americans. 

During his address Monday to the annual meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union with 330,000 members, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that President Trump is overturning Obama’s ban on supplying surplus military equipment to police. 

It is an issue that the Fraternal Order of Police and other police organizations cared about deeply during the campaign last year.  Indeed, they based their endorsement of Trump during the election on his promise to overturn this ban. 

Obama first ordered a review of the Clinton-era program after heavily armored police confronted rioters in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Obama worried that the armored vehicles and heavily-armored police only exacerbated tensions and led to more violence, but Obama never seemed to understand that with rocks, bottles, and tent poles being thrown at the police -- and even bullets being fired at them -- the police couldn’t have stood between the protestors and those who they were protecting without this gear.  And that without the police, the violence would have been much worse. 

If there are any doubts what would have happened without such protection, just remember how much worse the riots were when Governor Nixon (D-Missouri) temporarily kept the police and national guard out of Ferguson.  As one newspaper wrote: “A show of force by police and the U.S. National Guard in Ferguson, Missouri, prevented a second night of widespread rioting by early on Wednesday.”  Nixon might have been well motivated by the fear that police would only antagonize the rioters, but his decision meant that the demonstrators ran wild, destroying businesses and harming people. 

With businesses destroyed and leaving the area, it is the loss of jobs and higher prices that leave long-term scars on minority communities such as Ferguson. 

The vast majority of the military surplus equipment provided the police is purely defensive.  Still, even the more extreme sounding weapons, such as flashbang grenades and sniper rifles, have important uses.  Some police departments face well-armed and vicious drug gangs.  Flashbang grenades may be the safest option to immobilize criminals before police enter a room.  Sniper rifles might be necessary to save innocent lives when hostage situations exist. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.