Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., is an author, economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime.
Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime, and other books on crime and firearms, is the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). The CPRC is a research and education organization dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety; educating the public on the results of such research; and supporting other organizations, projects, and initiatives that are organized and operated for similar purposes.
Lott is critical of the George Soros-funded progressive activist district attorneys, such as Philly DA Larry Krasner, so I reached out to Dr. Lott and asked him why progressive DAs and other politicians can't seem to differentiate between legal firearms and illegal firearms.
“What we find is that the people who go and get a concealed carry permit are extremely law-abiding,” Lott replied. “They lose their permit for any kind of firearms-related violations. But you look at criminals, who are generally the people who commit murder, about 90 per cent of those who commit murder already had violent histories. Those are not normal people by any means. You see these people cycling through the system with x number of arrests.”
What do you think of the progressive district attorneys who are reluctant to prosecute gun crimes, I asked Dr, Lott.
“This isn’t rocket science. If you want to reduce crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crimes.” Lott said. “It means higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates and longer prison sentences for firearms-related crimes. With regards to these Soros prosecutors, the reason why they refuse to prosecute criminals for gun crimes is because they have this notion of racial equity with regard to punishment of blacks. Blacks tend to be convicted of crimes at relatively high rates, and the prosecutor’s argument is that different racial groups should be punished in percentage of records with their percentage of the overall population. So, nationwide blacks are thirteen percent of the population, and they should only make up thirteen percent of those getting punished.
“The problem is they are forgetting who the victims of these crimes are. Ninety percent of black murders are committed by blacks. So, you may be nice to black criminals, but that means you're mean to black victims. If they want to care about minorities, why not be concerned about the race of the victims who are minorities. The other thing is it has some impact on the crime statistics. I don't know if this is happening in Philadelphia, but in other places like New York with the district attorney Alvin Bragg, the prosecutors will downgrade firearm offenses from felonies to simple assault. The problem with this is that it makes the violent crime rate look well lower than it actually is.”
Every time there's a public shooting or assassination there is a knee-jerk reaction to advocate new additional gun laws. Would these new laws and restrictions stop these mass criminal shootings, I asked Dr. Lott.
“You have to punish criminals for their crimes and also make it so that victims are able to go and defend themselves,” Lott explained.
“I look at the laws that are put forward and the number one law that gets mentioned after these mass shootings has been universal background checks. There's not one mass public shooting century that would have been stopped if that law had been perfectly enforced. You look at the technical weapons that are used in these mass shootings over the last 25 years and fifteen percent of the mass public shootings involve a rifle of any type, and the notion that if the so-called assault weapons were banned, it would stop these attacks. You look at what just occurred in Australia. The rifles that were used there were not automatic rifles. You can literally see them manually load after each shot, and yet they had fifteen people murdered and something like 43 were wounded, which is much worse than the average public shooting that we have had here.
“You read the diaries and manifestos of these criminals. In these manifestos, we see why they picked the targets and what we find is that these individuals are suicidal and they target places where guns are banned in gun-free zones. They picked the gun-free zone because they wanted to kill more people and get more media attention without quickly being killed by someone with a legal firearm.”
