The War on Cops Doesn't Exist. More Guns Means More Death 10-19-2015

http://laconiadailysun.com/opinion/letters/89677-james-veverka-10-19-780

To the Editor,

Russ Wiles' war on cops doesn't exist. This is another false narrative created by Fox and right wingers. According to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, 807 cops lost their lives in the first six years of the Obama administration. At the same mark, 1129 police officers were killed under Reagan and 1034 were under Bush II. There is, however, vocal concern regarding cops who use excessive force. The height of the bar used in law enforcement screening, employment, and job performance has become a public health issue. That said, in a nation with 250 million guns and a gun murder rate that is nearly 20 times the rate of the OEDC average, cops have a right to be on edge. That is why we have to have the very best.

Mr Wiles cites John Lott's work which claims more guns mean less crime. The battle cry of the glassy eyed flag wavers is a bald faced lie. Using Lott's research is akin to using Andrew Wakefield's bogus vaccine study or Heartland Institute's fake climate "science". Lott's 20 year old claims have been widely debunked by peer review. His work caters to lazy thinkers looking for simple answers but reality requires nuanced critical thinking..

According to Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, right to carry wins are "based upon Lott’s scholarship" that has been "completely discredited." In 2005, the National Research Council (NRC) published a large report in which the panel concluded that existing research was "insufficient to say much of anything about a causal connection between crime and right-to-carry laws".

A 2012 paper,"The Impact of Right-to-Carry Laws and the NRC Report: Lessons for the Empirical Evaluation of Law and Policy." written by Stanford's Abhay Aneja and John J. Donohue and Hopkins' Alexandria Zhang, went one step further. It methodically analyzed the existing literature, including Lott's, and reached a much different conclusion: "Overall, the most consistent, albeit not uniform, finding to emerge from both the state and the county panel data models conducted over the entire 1977–2006 period with and without state trends and using three different models is that aggravated assault rises when [right-to-carry] laws are adopted." They found "very few statistically significant effects of RTC laws on crime rates, but almost all of them, significant or not, show crime increases". Raw data from the National Violent Death Reporting System as compiled by Harvard Injury Control Research Center also directly refutes many of Lott’s claims.

David Hemenway from the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote a similarly devastating review of “More Guns, Less Crime” in his book, 'Private Guns, Public Health'. He argues that there are five main ways to determine the appropriateness of a statistical model and John Lott’s model appears to fail every one of these tests. Ted Goetzl, a retired professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, published a paper in The Skeptical Inquirer which cataloging the most egregious abuses of econometrics in criminology. John R. Lott’s 'More Guns, Less Crime', was at the top of the list. University of Arkansas Law Professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a critical review of Lott entitled, “‘Lotts’ More Guns and Other Fallacies: Infecting the Gun Control Debate,” concludes that Lott’s entire manifesto "is one large example of fallacious post-hoc reasoning".

Compounding the problem are those who have action hero delusions like the woman that opened fire on a shoplifter at Home Depot last week. They live in a warped fantasy world fueled by the alternate realities of television, movies, and the rhetoric of gun nutters. Due to inexperience and the lack of special training under pressure, most people will not react logically in a shooting scenario, especially a sudden ambush shooting where the shooter has semi-automatic firearms and large clips. The observed evidence is clear: the average person doesn’t have the training or mindset to suddenly become a good guy with a gun. That takes continual weapons training under varied circumstances. Our gun murder rate dwarfs those of OEDC nations of Europe, Australia, NZ, and Asia because we think guns are the answer. While the call for more guns keeps coming from the gun lobby, not one mass shooting (4+ people) has been stopped by a good guy with a gun in the last 30 years.

Remember, retired Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle was killed at a gun range. Last year a gun shop was robbed at gunpoint. The Oregon shooting was not in a gun-free zone and several people in the school were armed. Its over in seconds and gun nuts just can't process that. This week marks the 1000th mass murder shooting (4+) since Sandy Hook. In the last decade, 280,024 people have been killed with guns in America. Time to grow up.