Before we delve into statistics, it is important to analyze the evidence pool from which Lott and other concealed carry proponents draw from. The story is always the same: a good guy had a gun, you just didn't hear it because the "liberal media" didn't tell you. Somehow, John Lott got his hands on the information.
One such story, told from the prospective of a "law-abiding" gun owner, is actually perfect at illustrating Lott's logical fallacies.
From the Hartford Courant's write-up of Tuesday's legislative hearing on the Newtown massacre:
Gun owner Andrew Starczewski of New Britain testified against the magazine restrictions by relating a harrowing story about thugs surrounding him and his fiance years ago in a Hartford parking garage.
"They were all young men, and all looked thuggish and dressed that way. … They had at least two bats and two guns, all deadly weapons. We would be overwhelmed by the thugs in seconds. Luckily I was armed, a very small handgun with only six rounds of minor caliber ammunition. … I would have given an eye, an arm, my teeth for a 15-round magazine," Starczewski said.
"When I released the safety of the gun … while it was still in my small-of-the-back holster … it made a click … and the lead guy did an about-face and waved off the other guys" and they ran off, Starczewski said later.
There are several problems with Starczweski's story. Let's start with the setting: a parking garage in Hartford, Connecticut. Fair enough. But according to Starczweski's account, there are several young men, dressed "thuggish," and carrying "at least two bats and two guns."
Stop right there. First of all, how many thugs are there? Are there just two thugs, each armed with a bat and a gun? Or two thugs, one with two guns, the other with two bats? Four people, each with either a bat, or a gun? Perhaps there were so many people, that Starczweski was simply unable to estimate, solely because he was trained to look for danger, and saw only the bats and guns that were presumably pointed in his direction. And there must be a lot of people, because Starczweski says he would forfeit a limp for the use of a 15-round magazine.
In any case, how did a group of people, armed with baseball bats and guns, bypass the gate attendant and the security cameras of the parking garage? A handgun can be concealed, but baseball bats?
Any willing suspension of disbelief goes out the window when Starczewski concludes his story. He had a gun. The "lead" guy called off his attackers. Think like the thief for a minute. You are about to rob someone. You find out he has a gun. Are you going to just walk away and give him a chance to shoot you in the back?
Even we assume that this highly dubious story is true, in spite of it incredulity, there is no evidence that Starczewski actually prevented a crime from being committed. Why? Well, for starters, he never reported this incident to the police. Stalking somebody with a deadly weapon is against the law, and by his own admission, Starczewski let them go unharmed. Now, this group of thugs is free to terrorize the next person they say in the parking garage.
The steering-wheel lock, known universally as the "club," is analogous to the aforementioned situation. The club does not reduce aggregate car theft, because a would be thief could simply walk past the "clubbed" car and steal the next one. Or, if the "clubbed" car was new model Mercedes/Audi/BMW, etc, the thief could just cut the club with a hacksaw in about two minutes, or slice right through with an angle grinder in about ten seconds. If a good citizen were to witness the thief and probe his actions, all he would need to do is smile and say, "I forgot my key."
But that's just me talking. What about Lott? For over a decade, Lott insisted that law-abiding gun owners were responsible for "preventing 2 million crimes per year." He said these were FBI statistics. Unfortunately, no one from the FBI has ever validated this claim. Lott now says that the number is somewhere "between 1.5 million and 3.4 million crimes every year."
That's right. 1.5 million to 3.4 million. By his own admission, Lott has a margin of error of 1.9 million crimes. If we hold that margin up to his original calculation of 2 million, we can conclude that Lott's margin of error is 95 percent. If we accept Lott's lower estimate of 1.5 million, we can conclude "more guns" translates into an increase of 400,000 crimes per year.
But hey, those are his numbers. And whatever model he is operating is completely at odds with basic statistical calculation. More guns and less crime? Using Lott's own research, let's consider this myth busted.
Post script: I decided to investigate Lott's claim that England's handgun ban, instituted in 1997, had caused murder rates to "double" by 2003. So, I checked. England and Wales recorded slightly under 800 murders in 1998, and slightly over 1,000 in 2003. Hardly a double, but an increase, right?However, 176 of those "2003" murderers were due to the conviction of serial killer Harold Shipman, a sick doctor who killed his patients. After his conviction, 176 previous "accidental deaths" were subsequently recorded as homicides. So, in 2003, the murder rate was about the same. Until the next year, and the year after, in which England and Wales recorded progressively lower murder rates, with 2012 being the lowest on record. It took me all of two minutes to this look this up.
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