Jonathan Turley on the loss of free speech

I have no respect for schools that do not discipline students who behave as Turley describes.  I think a three strikes and you are out policy is justified.

If you want to stop this behavior, simply stop sending your children there and stop contributing to them.

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We have been discussing the increasing practice of students interrupting classes or speeches to prevent others from hearing opposing views. This has included protests where students have been prevented from studying as other students accuse them of privilege or racism. Administrators at schools like Dartmouth have allowed such abusive conduct to occur without disciplinary action, even apologizing to the protesters. Now, twenty students were allowed to storm the Columbia University library Wednesday to protest the fact that College Republicans were allowed to exercise their free speech in bringing conservative speakers to campus. It was a demonstration that not only sought to deny other students free speech but did so in a way to deny students their right to study. Columbia has been silent on any effort to discipline the students. The Liberation Coalition occupied the library staircase while holding signs proclaiming “Decolonize Columbia” and “Divest from White Supremacy Now.”

The Columbia University College Republicans (CUCR) group has invited such speakers as Dennis Prager, Ann Coulter, and Mike Scaramucci to campus. The protesters objected that “Columbia’s actions last October—giving a platform to white supremacists and seeking to punish students for protesting them—was not an isolated incident.”

Columbia students had to endure such other students screaming “Dear students, what is anti-Black racism?” and “Can any student in this room right now tell me what anti-Black racism is? Ivy League! Ivy League! How does anti-Black racism play a role in what’s happening now?”

The protesters demanded “decolonization” of the curriculum since, as one protester explained, “Almost all of the readings, are white men.” They demanded that professors be forced to assign an “equitable amount of literature . . . from marginalized people: black people, women of color, trans people.”

I have previously written that universities have shown a striking lack of courage and commitment in defense of academic freedom and free speech. I previously discussed the utter failure of Northwestern to support these values in a conflict over a Sociology 201 class by Professor Beth Redbird that examines “inequality in American society with an emphasis on race, class and gender.” To that end, Redbird invited both an undocumented person and a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is the type of balance that it now considered verboten on campuses.

Members of MEChA de Northwestern, Black Lives Matter NU, the Immigrant Justice Project, the Asian Pacific American Coalition, NU Queer Trans Intersex People of Color and Rainbow Alliance organized to stop other students from hearing from the ICE representative. However, they could not have succeeded without the help of Northwestern administrators (including Dean of Students Todd Adams). The protesters were screaming “F**k ICE” outside of the hall. Adams and the other administrators then said that the protesters screaming profanities would be allowed into the class if they promised not to disrupt the class. Really? They were screaming profanities and seeking to stop the class but would just sit nicely as the speaker answered questions?

Of course, that did not happen. As soon as the protesters were allowed into the classroom, they prevented the ICE representative from speaking. The ICE representatives eventually left and Redbird canceled the class to discuss the issue with the protesters that just prevented her students from hearing an opposing view.

The comments of the Northwestern students were predictable after being told by people like Schapiro that some offensive speech should be treated as a form of assault. SESP sophomore April Navarro rejected that faculty should be allowed to invite such speakers to their classrooms for a “good, nice conversation with ICE.” She insisted such speakers needed to be silenced because they “terrorize communities” and profit from detainee labor. Here is the face of the new generation of censors being shaped by speech-intolerant academics like Schapiro:

“We’re not interested in having those types of conversations that would be like, ‘Oh, let’s listen to their side of it’ because that’s making them passive rule-followers rather than active proponents of violence. We’re not engaging in those kinds of things; it legitimizes ICE’s violence, it makes Northwestern complicit in this. There’s an unequal power balance that happens when you deal with state apparatuses.”

It is reminiscent of chilling recent editorial by students at Wellesley dismissing free speech protections for those with whom they disagree. We have also seen physical attacks on pro-life advocates at the University of California justified on the basis that such views constitute a form of “terrorism.” Likewise, leaders like Howard Dean have dismissed the notion of free speech protection for anything that he views as hate speech.

As for Northwestern, the official response to students shutting down a class to silence an opposing view resulted in a statement that the actions of the students were “disappointing that the speakers were not allowed to speak.” That is a disgrace. Students interrupting classes or speakers should be suspended and, for repeated such violations, expelled.

In Berkeley, students stopped other students from taking a midterm examination as the professor virtually pleaded that they allowed other students to finish their work. Students are being reinforced in their disruption of classes by Administrators and faculty. For example, I recently discussed the bizarre response of CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek in such a case. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. It reveals the twisted logic overtaking our schools on both tolerance and free speech.

Blackman, a law professor from the South Texas College of Law Houston, often writes thoughtful conservative takes on legal issues and was appearing at an event with the CUNY Federalist Society. While Bilek says that the heckler’s caused only a “limited” interruption, Blackman says that it was prolonged and prevented him from being able to give his full speech.

The protesters reportedly chanted things like “legal objectivity is a myth” and called him “a white supremacist.”

Bilek responded in an email to Inside Higher Ed, that the interruption was acceptable because it was short: “For the first eight minutes of the 70-minute event, the protesting students voiced their disagreements. The speaker engaged with them. The protesting students then filed out of the room, and the event proceeded to its conclusion without incident.”

She added “this non-violent, limited protest was a reasonable exercise of protected free speech,” adding that “it did not violate any university policy.” Not a single CUNY law professor is on record opposing this view, though non-law professors have courageously asked for an explanation of the policy.

I recently wrote how Antifa and other college protesters are increasingly denouncing free speech and the foundations for liberal democracies. Some protesters reject classic liberalism and the belief in free speech as part of the oppression on campus. The movement threatens both academic freedom and free speech — a threat that is growing due to the failure of administrators and faculty to remain true to core academic principles.

A clear line must be drawn between protesting and preventing speech or teaching or studying. There is no easy way to deal with such obstruction. Students who shutdown classes or speeches or libraries should be disciplined and, in appropriate cases, expelled.

EPA, the nature of regulation, and democracy

Jon Cochrane gets it right on regulation.

The lovers of regulation are despots looking for ways to further their agenda with force without regard to those of others.

They are also guilty of having agendas that fail to consider a reasonable set of trade-offs with suitable weightings.

If you let them accomplish what they want, your standard of living will be markedly lower and you will lose your freedom (what is left).
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My Hoover colleague Richard Epstein posted a revealing essay on the nature of environmental regulation last week, with environmental regulation as a particular example. The contrast with "Environmental Laws Under Siege: Here is why we have them" in New York Times and the New Yorker's Scott Pruitt's Dirty Politics is instructive

Epstein's point is not about the raw amount of or even what's in the regulation, but the procedure by which regulation is imposed:

As drafted, NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 ] contains no provision that allows private parties to challenge agency decisions in court. Instead, the NEPA approval process is a matter for internal agency consultation and deliberation that takes into account comments submitted by any interested parties.

 
One year after its passage, NEPA was turned upside down in a key decision by Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals... Wright read the law as giving private parties the right to challenge government actions. Indeed, Wright welcomed such challenges, writing (admiringly) that the change, “promises to become a flood of new litigation—litigation seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment.”

Giving private parties the right to challenge an agency decision grants enormous leverage to the private parties most opposed to letting projects go forward. In the case of nuclear power, delay became the order of the day, as the D.C. Circuit on which Judge Wright sat arrogated to itself the power to find that any EA or EIS was insufficient in some way, so that the entire project was held up until a new and exhaustively updated EIS was prepared—which could then be duly challenged yet again in court.

Epstein offers another case:

... the approval process for the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and its offshoot, the 163-mile Bayou Bridge Pipeline, ...Both pipelines are capable of transporting close to 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day by incorporating state-of-the-art technologies that make them far safer than the alternative means used for shipping crude oil long distances: the railroads and trucks that create logistical nightmares and are capable of causing catastrophic spills, and the older pipelines that are still in service....
In case you missed it, the pipelines have large net environmental benefits. Pipelines are better than trucks.

Nonetheless, the completion of DAPL has been delayed by fierce objections from both Native American groups and environmental groups. Under NEPA, they have legal standing to object to any proposed project by pointing to improbable risks while ignoring the undisputed gains in safety and efficiency that these pipelines promise. ...

...The sustained objection to the pipelines is driven not by any concern for safety, but by an overarching effort to use the NEPA process to stop the production, distribution, and use of fossil fuels.

If you want a left of center example, environmental suits have been used to slow down the still nonexistent California high speed train.

Epstein offers procedural remedies, not ram-my-view-down-their-throats

NEPA thus needs to be cut down to size. For starters, courts should reject Calvert Cliffs. Today’s courts must be much more sensitive to the necessary trade-offs before overturning the detailed factual findings that government agencies make on technical matters in approving projects. In addition, courts should be reluctant to stop projects because of some gap in an EA or EIS.... And third, they must explicitly take into account the major environmental, economic, and political gains that the project has to offer, such as the removal of more dangerous modes of transportation in the case of the pipelines.

This reflects my larger view in an earlier essay on regulation. The issue is not a simple "more vs less" regulation, the issue is how regulation proceeds.

The New York Times offers an interesting contrast. In an article titled "Environmental Laws Under Siege: Here is why we have them" --- in the news section, not opinion -- reporters Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis remind us of some of the environmental disasters of the 1960s. For example, the Cuyahoga River really did burn, 13 times. They conclude

Waterways across the United States are markedly cleaner though half still fall short of national goals. Recent decisions, though, could lead to backsliding.

 
The E.P.A. has suspended the Obama-era Waters of the United States rules, which sought to clarify which waters are considered part of the national water system...
Air and water is a lot cleaner than in the 1970s, a huge and praiseworthy accomplishment of environmental law and regulation. But that does not mean every current action of the EPA is "progress," and any criticism is "Backsliding."

All the Times offers a reader is a simple morality play of "progress" vs. evil forces of reaction. If you have doubts about the Waters of the United States rules, which basically put every mud-puddle under federal control, then you must be part of a cabal who wants to "backslide" us all the way to rivers that burn. And likely bought off by nefarious corporate interests.

Not even the article title is right. The Waters of the United States is a rule, not a law. The law gave the EPA authority over "navigable waters." The EPA decided to interpret that rather broadly to put it mildly. Your kitchen sink is connected to navigable waters too. And your kitchen sink is not unregulated. States forbid you to throw motor oil down the kitchen sink, so the issue is federal preemption of state regulation -- which can cut both ways, forbidding states to impose higher standards. (Politico's coverage, the first that came up in a google search, was actually pretty good on covering both sides.)

Anyway, you can see there are subtle procedural issues here. Did the EPA exceed its legal authority over "navigable waters?" The house thought so and passed an over ride of the rule. Should, as politico mentioned, federal environmental impact review be triggered every time a farmer drains a mud puddle? Maybe. Should you be able to file environmental suits to stop your neighbors from construction projects you don't like, as Epstein bemoans?

These are the tough questions in a democracy, which you do not learn from the Times' simple morality tale.

In the New Yorker, ground zero of Trumpoplexy, Margret Talbot finished her long attack on Scott Pruitt (yes, I read the New Yorker, and yes, I often actually finish articles) with

"One of the engineers said that it might take a while to “rebuild capacity” after Pruitt. But it would be done. The public, he reminded everyone, “is expecting us to protect the planet.” He said, “Pruitt is a temporary interloper. We are the real agency."

My jaw dropped. No, I am not making this up. This is not fake news from some alt-Right website.

Nor was it at all ironic. Ms. Talbot clearly meant this to reassure us that everything will be ok.

In case I have to pound you over the head with it, this is exactly the kind of bureaucratic obstructionism that those who bemoan the "deep state" point to.

This would not be so ironic if it were not so blatantly hypocritical. The New York Times and the New Yorker are also ground zero for authoritarian alarmism -- Trump is trampling democracy, checks and balances, he is the new Mussolini. Yet notice here who is for democracy and who is against it.

Democracy worries that unchecked power -- the power to write laws (regulations are laws), interpret them after the fact, impose large fines and jail sentences, hear appeals to such judgments, and to set standards on which citizens can sue each other and block each other's affairs -- must be constrained by judicial review, congressional review, and the ballot box. If those get it wrong at times, so be it. Democracy was never about superb technocratic competence (!) Democracy is a last ditch safeguard against little tyrants run amok. And large ones.

Democracy is not about what is the right answer and then ram it down their throats. Democracy is about the subtle question of who shall decide that answer and how.

If the New Yorker and New York Times were honest, they would write that in their view, the environment (along with about 50 other issues) is so important that democracy must be abolished. If deplorable yahoos vote in a president who clearly campaigned on a regulatory roll back, and then appoints agency heads who do exactly that, then the president's power -- the electorate's power -- to change the nature of regulation must be abolished. Likewise if the same deplorable yahoos vote in a Congress who passes a law countermanding the agencies action. Hooray for the agency that can obstruct these efforts and fight on! (It will be interesting to see their attitude when Trump appointees at, say, the CFPB, similarly resist President Elizabeth Warren's reforms.) The right of people to even express contrary views is dubious in the quest for "progress." Just who decides what news is "fake" will soon be up for grabs.

That would be honest, and a fair description of their position. Authoritarians have made similar arguments through the ages. China makes it today. Democracy is too messy, the wrong people can take power.

Let's just be clear who is making the authoritarian argument, and who the democratic one. And this predates Trump by decades.

Let us indeed celebrate the remarkable improvement in the environment in America. And let us hope that the anti-democratic forces among us do not succeed in their effort at such over-reach that the whole edifice loses its bipartisan credibility and comes tumbling down, or the nation screeches to a halt.

Free Speech RIP

Here is Jonathan Turley on the trend toward eliminating free speech. JT is on target.
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Below is my column in The Hill on the speech by French President Emmanuel Macron and his calling for the United States to join France in a crackdown on “fake news.” Our members were either clueless or complicit in this thinly veiled call for speech regulation on the Internet. However, there is growing pressure from Europe for the United States to abandon its long commitment to free speech — a call that is being heard by a rising number of academics and politicians.
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French President Emmanuel Macron has won the hearts of many Americans, from his planting a tree at the White House to his passionate speech before a joint session of Congress yesterday. For civil libertarians, however, one moment will remain chilling and lasting. It is when Macron called for a joint war against “fake news” and declared, “Democracy is about true choices and rational decisions. The corruption of information is an attempt to corrode the very spirit of our democracies.”

While both Democratic and Republican members were on their feet in rapturous applause, Macron used code familiar to free speech advocates, and it is the antithesis of democratic values. Indeed, it is a mantra that has been used to roll back free speech in Europe, where leaders are about to do the same to the press in new internet regulations. While long rejected in this country, leading American politicians and academics appear eager to adopt this coded pitch of censorship.

Over the course of the last 50 years, the French, English and Germans have waged an open war on free speech by criminalizing speech deemed insulting, harassing or intimidating. In France, a politician was convicted for complaining about the rising number of immigrants children flooding the public education system, while a comedian was charged for making jokes insulting to Jews. In England, a boy was held by police for holding up a sign reading “Scientology is a cult,” while the government there is moving to make “wolf whistles” a hate speech crime this year.

In Germany, a minister was banned from social media for calling an author an “idiot,” while a comedian was charged for making fun of Turkish authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Others have been charged for criticizing homosexuality as well as particular religions and religious practices. After decimating free speech in their countries, these countries are leading an effort to regulate the Internet and punish “fake news.” What is particularly maddening is that they are asking citizens to give up more free speech and free press rights in the name of democracy, just as Macron did this week before our gleeful, starstruck members of Congress.

Recently, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, appeared in Austin, Texas, to encourage Americans to join the European effort to force tech companies to censor hate speech and be subject to government regulations or fines for violations. Once beyond the sound bites, however, the real impact of these laws becomes apparent. Consider the new European Union strategy for fighting “fake news” last week. The East Stratcom Task Force compiled a hall of shame of 3,800 news articles that it highlighted as the type of “fake news” that must be targeted.

On the list was a Post Online article that called Ukraine “an oligarch state with no independent media” and raised the country’s horrific record in World War II against Polish Jews. Brussels and many European countries have maintained a strong pro-Ukraine stance. The article was listed as “fake” even though it was based on a lecture delivered by a journalist who had spent time in Ukraine and is a view shared by many. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and other authoritarian nations have embraced “fake news” as the justification for their own crackdowns on dissidents.

The United States has long been a bulwark against this anti-free speech trend but that could be coming to an end. Leading American voices are now advocating a crackdown on hateful or fake speech in the name of tolerance. A group of college deans has called for the rejection of a broad array of speech as hate speech, including words that “spread” or “provoke” or “create” “animosity” and “hostility.” They simply declared, “Hate speech does not equal free speech,” and left the definition of what constitutes hate speech for later. We have seen how that discretionary power is used on our college campuses where a wide array of free speech is now regularly punished as either hateful or a form of “microaggression.”

Free speech itself is now often denounced as not a liberty to protect but an oppression to be resisted. At the College of William and Mary, classic liberalism, which favors free speech, was denounced recently as “white supremacy” in stopping an American Civil Liberties Union speaker from defending free speech. Democratic National Committee deputy chairman, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), recently posted a picture holding the “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” which espouses the “anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase … that says I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Others rationalize such tactics in the name of free speech itself. The dean of City University of New York School of Law, Mary Lu Bilek, recently declared that students who prevented a conservative professor from speaking on campus were acting in the fulfillment of free speech values. Bilek essentially insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. It reveals the twisted logic overtaking our schools.

This is not just a liberal problem exclusively. Former FBI director James Comey was recently stopped from speaking by a conservative activist. Many conservatives are also seeking the termination of California State University professor Randa Jarrar after she appeared to celebrate the death of former first lady Barbara Bush in offensive comments on social media. This is why the ecstatic reception given Macron is so worrisome. There is a growing audience in the United States for declaring certain speech as unworthy of protection or a threat in itself. In the meantime, there are bipartisan efforts in Congress to limit Internet speech and impose European-style liability on Internet providers and sites.

Before we protect free speech by killing it, however, Americans should look at what Macron and his colleagues have done in across the Atlantic in achieving “true choices and rational decisions.” Macron helped plant a lovely European oak on the White House grounds and we should keep it. However, Marcon’s effort to plant the seed of European speech regulation should be rejected as an unwelcomed and invasive species.

Gun free zones are preferred by mass murderers

From the Crime Prevention Research Center via John Lott in The Hill.
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Another mass public shooting in another gun-free zone, and yet again the media ignores it. Right at the front of the Waffle House restaurant in Antioch, Tennessee was a sign prohibiting firearms. But none of the news media, neither national nor local, reported that fact.

Even having a president who finally emphasizes the dangers of gun-free zones for mass public shootings isn’t enough to get the press to consider this newsworthy.

Almost immediately, the media was telling Americans all sorts of other details. We knew what type of gun was used. We learned that the killer had his gun confiscated last year after he was caught trespassing in a restricted area near the White House. We found out that he had stalked Taylor Swift and that he had previously threatened people with a gun.

The easiest thing to report on is the one thing that the media consistently ignores. Obviously, with an active crime scene investigation, the media can’t go right up to the front of the restaurant. But they still could easily have seen the gun-free zone sign through their telephoto camera lenses. A throng of journalists quickly gathered across the street from the Waffle House, but none of them provided a picture of that sign.

Perhaps if the media would pay notice to some of the dozens of recent instances of concealed handgun permit holders stopping what according to police or prosecutors would have been mass public shootings, they would realize the danger of gun-free zones. In October 2015, a permit holder protected people from a robber outside of another Waffle House restaurant in Charleston County, South Carolina. not clear from this that it would have been a mass public shooting.

Over 98 percent of US mass public shootings since 1950 have occurred in gun-free zones, according to my research. Given that permit holders in right-to-carry states can carry in the vast majority of the state, it is conspicuous that these attacks keep on occurring in those relatively tiny areas where permitted concealed handguns are not allowed. It could have a big effect on public opinion if the media were to mention this fact once in a while.

Waffle House restaurants have even asked on-duty, uniformed National Guard members with holstered handguns to leave. Only on-duty police have been exempt from the company’s restrictions.

Clearly, Waffle House's strict ban on concealed handguns didn't work on Sunday. It may even have cost lives. But within just hours of the attack, many media outlets were only giving a platform to voices calling for more gun control.

“We can take these weapons of war off the streets of our country,” declared Nashville’s Democratic mayor David Briley. Congressman Jim Cooper (D), who represents Antioch, called for restricting "widespread civilian access to military-grade assault weapons."

Predictably, prominent gun control advocates such as Gabrielle Giffords once again called for a ban on so-called assault weapons.

Gun control advocates have learned little from the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. Academic studies, even ones funded by the Clinton administration, have consistently failed to find evidence that this ban reduced any type of crime.

Polls show that some surprising groups of Americans are questioning the benefits of these gun-free zones. A recent Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 59 percent of parents with school-age children support giving financial incentives to teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns. By contrast, 54 percent of people without school-age children supported gun-free zones. The people with the most to lose are the most interested in arming our schools.

The national news media isn’t a neutral observer in the gun control debate. It ignores the harm that gun control causes. It ignores the crimes stopped by law-abiding permit holders. Consequently, Americans are misled about the costs and benefits of people owning and carrying guns. This is a critically important issue, and Americans deserve better information.

The academic anti-gunners and the facts

Contrast this

More people have died or been injured in mass school shootings in the US in the past 18 years than in the entire 20th century. In a new study published in Springer's Journal of Child and Family Studies, researchers have reviewed the history of mass school shootings in the US and found some alarming trends. Lead author Antonis Katsiyannis of Clemson University in the US, together with his colleagues, found the recent killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida is not an isolated occurrence, but part of a deadly epidemic that needs to be addressed.

A shooting is defined as a "mass shooting" when four or more people are killed (excluding the shooter). Sporadic school shootings have occurred at various points in the history of the US. For example, in 1940 a junior high school principal killed six adults including the school's district business manager. No similar mass shootings occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. However, school shootings have been steadily increasing since 1979. Overall, the death toll from mass school shootings was 12 in the 1980s and 36 in the 1990s.

with this from the Crime Prevention Research Center.

Note the failure to mention the disparate record before and after the Gun Free Zone Acts of 1990 and 1995.  Also, focusing on K-12:

The moral of the story is that the academics were either incompetent or purposely misleading.

Puns and more

Guns in Schools - some common sense perspective and some facts

From the Crime Prevention Research Center.

LINK

Too many people have a victim mentality.  They are afraid of guns, don't trust normal citizens with guns, refuse to allow other people to have guns so that they can defend themselves and others, etc.

You would think from listening to these people and the media that only the police know how to use guns.  After all, these people don't trust even trained citizens or ex military who are teachers to have guns in schools.

They don't realize that many trained citizens and ex military are more competent with guns than most police officers.  This is not because police are incompetent, they are not.  It is because many citizens spend more time practicing with guns than most police do.

There is a reason why most mass murders occur in "gun free zones".  It is because the perpetrators know that normal citizens with concealed carry licenses are competent enough to stop them.

Of course, part of the problem is that the anti-gun groups spread "facts" that are completely wrong - always designed to support their anti-gun agenda.

If you really want to know the FACTS, read John Lott's "More Guns Less Crime".  It shows you how to think about gun laws, presents the real FACTS, and takes apart the anti-gun crowds claims.

The Armed Citizen

Things I will not be doing.

The Universe may be only one of Many - or one of an infinity of them

Brian Randolph Greene[1] (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festivalsince co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds(concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.

Here is a link to a talk by him about the universe - or rather the multiverse.

I like this idea.  It seems plausible.

My question: Does String Theory allow the number of universes to correspond to the number of positive integers or the number of real numbers between 0 and 1, or an even greater number?

How to save school children’s lives.

John Lott in the Hill.
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The polls indicate that Americans support more gun control right now, but are also very skeptical that more gun control will reduce violence or mass public shootings. We typically see such increased support temporarily after mass public shootings. To win the debate, proponents of the right to self-defense must explain how their proposals are practical. They must explain how gun control actually makes people more vulnerable to attack.

Everyone wants to do something about mass public shootings. But while gun control advocates call for more gun control within an hour of attacks, such as the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, prominent Republicans and even the NRA often go completely silent in the week after the attack. Gun control advocates’ proposals may have the appearance of swift action, but ideas such as universal background checks really have nothing to do with stopping these attacks.

The delayed response of the NRA and others lets gun control advocates claim: “Those who oppose reforms say nothing can be done.” Gun control advocates claim to be the only ones who care, and many Americans go along with the idea that further regulation is the only available option. After all, something must be done, and at least gun control advocates are trying to stop attacks.

Of course, the NRA has never claimed that nothing can be done. When NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre spoke out eight days after Parkland, he called for armed security officers in schools. The NRA’s National School Shield program has helped lead that effort. The Republican governor in Florida got legislation allocating half billion dollars a year to put one police officer in each public school.

Only President Trump and a few other politicians went on the offensive, pushing the one option that would really make a difference — letting teachers and staff carry permitted, concealed handguns. These Republican understand that a lone officer in uniform faces an almost impossible job. Officers become the first targets in these attacks, as attackers know that if they kill the officer, they will have free reign to continue their massacre. Putting a guard in every school is also very costly.

Parents with children of K-12 age are surprisingly supportive of arming teachers. A Rasmussen survey after the Parkland shooting shows that 59 percent support President Trump’s proposal to give teachers monetary incentives to carry guns in school. The pushback comes from adults who don’t have students in school, with 54 percent of them opposing the idea.

Police are also strongly in favor of abolishing gun-free school zones. Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, PoliceOne, a 450,000-member private organization of police (380,000 active, full-time and 70,000 retired officers), surveyed its members and found that 77 percent supported arming teachers and/or school staff. Eighty-six percent of the officers believed that casualties in mass public shootings would have been reduced or altogether prevented if legally-armed citizens had been able to carry guns.

Despite the President’s bully pulpit and this strong level of support, the mainstream media considers the idea of arming teachers to be out of the bounds of serious discussion.

But to varying degrees in 18 states, K-12 schools are already allowing teachers and staff to carry guns The fears of gun control advocates haven't been realized. Outside of a firearms training class, there has only ever been one accidental discharge of a gun by a these teachers or staff in any of these schools, occurring after-hours in a Utah school restroom. No one was shot. Furthermore, no teacher or staffer has ever lost control of his or her gun. No mass public shooting has ever occurred in a school that allows teachers and staff to carry.

According to police, sheriffs and prosecutors, there have been dozens of cases of concealed handgun permit holders stepping in and preventing mass public shootings. But in none of these cases have permit holders ever accidentally shot a bystander or themselves been mistakenly shot by responding officers.

Just wanting to pass more laws doesn’t mean that you “care.” It's not true that the only option is to pass more gun control. If we really want to do something, let's pass laws that would empower people to save lives.

Coffee consumption may be beneficial against coronary calcification

From the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Full text is available at this link.
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Background

Available evidence for the relationship between coffee intake and subclinical atherosclerosis is limited and inconsistent. This study aimed to evaluate the association between coffee consumption and coronary artery calcium (CAC) in ELSA‐Brasil (Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health).

Methods and Results

This cross‐sectional study is based on baseline data from participants of the ELSA‐Brasil cohort. Only participants living in São Paulo, Brazil, who underwent a CAC measurement (n=4426) were included. Coffee consumption was collected using a food frequency questionnaire. CAC was detected with computed tomography and expressed as Agatston units. CAC was further categorized as an Agatson score ≥100 (CAC ≥100). In multiple logistic regression analysis considering intake of coffee and smoking status interaction, significant inverse associations were observed between coffee consumption (>3 cups/d) and CAC≥100 (odds ratio [OR]: 0.85 [95% confidence interval, 0.58–1.24] for ≤1 cup/d; OR: 0.73 [95% confidence interval, 0.51–1.05] for 1–3 cups/d; OR: 0.33 [95% confidence interval, 0.17–0.65] for >3 cups/d). Moreover, there was a statistically significant interaction effect for coffee consumption and smoking status (P=0.028 for interaction). After stratification by smoking status, the analysis revealed a lower OR of coronary calcification in never smokers drinking >3 cups/d (OR: 0.37 [95% confidence interval, 0.15–0.91]), whereas among current and former smokers, the intake of coffee was not significantly associated with coronary calcification.

Conclusions

Habitual consumption of >3 cups/d of coffee decreased odds of subclinical atherosclerosis among never smokers. The consumption of coffee could exert a potential beneficial effect against coronary calcification, particularly in nonsmokers.

Civil Forfeiture - Government Tyranny

George Will in the Washington Post.  GW is on target.

Characterizing the US as free is a mistake.  And it is getting less free day by day.
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After two years of stonewalling about its theft of Gerardo Serrano’s 2014 Ford F-250 pickup truck, the government suddenly returned it. It sparkled from having been washed and detailed, bumper to bumper, and it had four new tires and a new battery. The government probably hoped that, mollified by the truck’s sprucing-up, Serrano would let bygones be bygones and go back to Kentucky. This was another mistake by our mistake-prone government.

Assisted by litigators from the Institute for Justice (IJ), whose appearance on the West Texas horizon probably panicked the government into pretending to be law-abiding, Serrano wants to make the government less larcenous and more constitutional when it is enriching itself through civil forfeiture.

On Sept. 21, 2015, Serrano drove to the Eagle Pass, Tex., border crossing, intending to try to interest a Mexican cousin in expanding his solar panel installation business in the United States. To have mementos of his trip, he took some pictures of the border with his cellphone camera, which annoyed two U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, who demanded the password to his phone. Serrano, who is what an American ought to be regarding his rights, prickly, refused to submit to such an unwarranted invasion of his privacy. One agent said he was “sick of hearing about your rights” and “you have no rights here.” So, they searched his truck — this was unusual for a vehicle leaving the country — and one agent said, “We got him!”

Having found five .380-caliber bullets in the truck’s center console — he has a concealed-carry permit but had no weapon with him — they handcuffed him and seized his truck under civil forfeiture, saying it had been used to transport “munitions of war.” The next time someone warns about the potential for domestic abuse of supposed national security measures, do not dismiss him or her as a neurotic libertarian.  

Civil forfeiture is the power to seize property suspected of being produced by, or involved in, crime. In this “Through the Looking-Glass,” guilty-until-proven-innocent inversion, the property’s owners bear the burden of proving that they were not involved in such activity, which can be a costly and protracted process as people must hire lawyers and do battle with a government wielding unlimited resources. Law enforcement agencies get to keep the profits from forfeited property, which gives them an incentive to do what too many of them do: abuse the process. But, then, the process — punishment before a crime is proven — is inherently abusive.

The government seems mystified that Serrano will not leave bad enough alone and drive away. It says he got his truck back after a mere 25 months, so “there is no longer any case or controversy.” Serrano says, let me count the ways I have been injured by “thugs with badges.”

Before the government would deign to promise (falsely, it turned out) to give him due process — to allow him to request a judicial hearing — it extorted from Serrano a bond of 10 percent of the truck’s value ($3,804.99). The government quickly cashed his check. (Not until the IJ cavalry rode in did he get his money back.) The hearing never happened. During the two years Serrano was without the truck, he had to continue making $672.97 monthly payments on it, and he had to pay more than $700 to insure it, $1,004.61 to register it in Kentucky and thousands more for rental cars.

Serrano is suing for restitution but also seeking a class-action judgment on behalf of others who have been similarly mistreated. Just at Eagle Pass, one of 73 crossing points on the U.S.-Mexico border, the CBP seizes, on average, well more than 100 Americans’ vehicles a year. Serrano seeks to establish a right to prompt post-seizure judicial hearings. These would be improvements, but of a process that requires radical revision, if not abolition.

Robert Everett Johnson is one of the IJ lawyers whose interest in the case galvanized the CBP’s hitherto dormant interest in Serrano’s rights. Johnson says: “Imagine being detained at an airport checkpoint because you innocently forgot to take a tube of toothpaste out of your luggage. But rather than asking you to throw it out or put it in a plastic bag, the TSA agents told you they were seizing all of your luggage, including the toothpaste tube.” That happened to Serrano at the hands of a government — the one north of the border — that felt free to say, “You have no rights here.”

Do states with stricter gun control laws have fewer gun deaths? No. Do they have fewer homicides and suicides? Definitely not

From the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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27 MAR , 2018  

Do more gun control laws mean fewer firearm deaths?  Gun control advocates typically provide graphs looking across states that show more gun control laws related to fewer firearm deaths, but there are real problems with this approach.  A Boston University School of Public Health project is one of the latest to make the rounds in various news outlets.

Few academics look at such purely cross-sectional data, simply because it is impossible in that case to accurately account for differences across different places.  One of the classic comparisons is the homicide rates between the US and the UK.  People will point out that the UK has strict gun control laws, few legally owned guns, and a low homicide rate.  But the homicide rate in the UK has always been low, even before they had any gun control law. Indeed, when they banned handguns in January 1997 their homicide rates rose dramatically, up 45% over the next eight years and only came back down after a large increase in the number of police.

One other caution should also be raised.  Lumping all the different gun control numbers into one number is pretty arbitrary.  Not only is there the issue of what gun control laws to include, there is also the issue of how to weight them.  Is a three day waiting period on buying guns the same as background checks on private transfers or a ban on open carrying of guns?  Just adding up the number of laws in a state assumes that all the laws have the same importance.  There is also the question of how many different ways that one divides up an existing law.  For example, the Boston University dataset separately counts whether there is a background required to get a concealed handgun permit and also separately whether a background check is needed to renew the permit, but not whether training is required to get a permit (or the varying lengths of training) or the large differences in permit fees.

This discretion allows a lot of possible data manipulation.  You can exclude or include what laws to use in constructing your score based on how it is correlated with homicides or suicides.  The Brady Campaign index that we will use has a correlation coefficient of .86 with the Boston University index.  Brady Campaign’s listing of gun control laws is a credible source from the perspective of gun control groups and because they would be less likely to be aware of how the index might be used by future statisticians they would be less likely to manipulate it to get their desired results at least when panel data is used (the bias would still be likely with purely cross-sectional data).

The typical academic approach for dealing with many different gun control laws is actually quite different.  Rather than lumping all the laws together the normal approach is to simultaneously account for each law separately in a regression.  For example, Dr. Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2010, 3rd edition), examines 13 different types of gun control laws and also accounts for differences in things such as the the length of waiting periods, the number of hours of training required to get a permit, and the yearly cost of a concealed handgun permit.

Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Risk of Death

From Practice Update.
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Background

The cardioprotective properties of linoleic acid (LA), a major n-6 (ω-6) polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA), have been recognized, but less is known about its associations with other causes of death. Relatively little is also known about how the minor n-6 PUFAs-γ-linolenic acid (GLA), dihomo-γ-linolenic acid (DGLA), and arachidonic acid (AA)-relate to mortality risk.

Objective

We investigated the associations of serum n-6 PUFAs, an objective biomarker of exposure, with risk of death in middle-aged and older men and whether disease history modifies the associations.

Design

We included 2480 men from the prospective Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study, aged 42-60 y at baseline in 1984-1989. The stratified analyses by baseline disease status included 1019 men with a history of cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, or diabetes and 1461 men without a history of disease.

Results

During the mean follow-up of 22.4 y, 1143 deaths due to disease occurred. Of these, 575 were CVD deaths, 317 were cancer deaths, and 251 were other-cause deaths. A higher serum LA concentration was associated with a lower risk of death from any cause (multivariable-adjusted HR for the highest compared with the lowest quintile: 0.57; 95% CI: 0.46, 0.71; P-trend < 0.001) and with deaths due to CVD (extreme-quintile HR: 0.54; 95% CI: 0.40, 0.74; P-trend < 0.001) and non-CVD or noncancer causes (HR: 0.48; 95% CI: 0.30, 0.76; P-trend = 0.001). Serum AA had similar, although weaker, inverse associations. Serum GLA and DGLA were not associated with risk of death, and none of the fatty acids were associated with cancer mortality. The results were generally similar among those with or without a history of major chronic disease (P-interaction > 0.13).

Conclusions

Our findings showed an inverse association of a higher biomarker of LA intake with total and CVD mortality and little concern for risk, thus supporting the current dietary recommendations to increase LA intake for CVD prevention. The finding of an inverse association of serum AA with the risk of death needs replication in other populations.

Exposing the Left's lies about gun violence and gun laws

From the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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Responding to Vox’s popular: “America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 17 maps and charts”

An article at Vox has gained attention for illustrating America’s “unique gun violence problem” in 17 maps and charts.  Below, we will respond to the individual graphs below on Vox’s terms.  But there are a lot of assumptions behind Vox’s graphs.  Often just one or two public health studies are cited to make a particular point, without discussing any of the known weaknesses with these studies or acknowledging and critiquing research that shows the opposite of the conclusion that they would like to reach.

Economists focus on the notion of substitution.  If you take away guns, people might commit suicides or murders in other ways.  It is total deaths that need to concern everyone.  Vox and focus exclusively on gun deaths without looking at the larger picture.

There are many countries that have higher gun homicide rates than the United States, but simply don’t report firearm homicide data.  Many of these meet the criteria to be members of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).  While 192 countries report total homicides, only 116 countries report firearm homicides.  The average homicide rate among countries that don’t have firearm homicide data is 11.1 per 100,000.

Homicide is not synonymous with murder.  Homicides count both murders and justifiable homicides (when a police officer or a civilian kills someone in self-defense).  In the five years from 2011 to 2015, the US experienced 11,577 firearm homicides and 8,786.4 firearm murders.  This gap is much larger in the US than in other countries, so comparing homicide rates gives a more unfavorable impression of the US than if we looked only at murder rates.

Murder isn’t a nationwide problem in the United States; it’s a problem in a very small set of urban areas.  In 2014, the worst 2 percent of counties accounted for 52 percent of the murders. Five percent of counties accounted for 68 percent of the murders. Even within these counties, there are large regions without any murders.  Clearly, drug gangs have contributed a lot to the violent crime problems in America’s cities.  Many of these gangs have easy access to illegal guns.

The popular press likes to compare crime rates in different places at the same point in time.  But academics are aware of the limitations of this simple, cross-sectional comparison.  Gun control advocates often compare the US and the UK, pointing out that the UK has stricter gun control and lower homicide rates than the US.  Omitted is the fact that the UK’s homicide rate went up after its gun control laws were enacted.

The UK’s homicide rate was still lower than the US’s, but it was despite the country’s counterproductive gun control laws, not because of them.  The homicide rate was very low even before the UK had any gun control laws.  To understand the effects of the laws, we have to see how homicide rates change before and after their implementation.  Then, we can compare these changes in crime rates with the changes in places that didn’t reform their laws.

One thing gun control advocates such as Vox would never mention is that every single time that guns have been banned — either all guns or all handguns — homicide/murder rates rise.  This is a remarkable fact.  One would think that just due to random chance, one or two countries would have a drop in homicides after banning guns.

Vox also has video that differs from the graphs that they have in the text.  In particular, they start out of with a discussion on mass public shootings using data collected by Jaclyn Schildkraut of the State University of New York-Oswego and H. Jaymi Elsass, a researcher at Texas State University.  Unfortunately, in December 2015, when it was pointed out that their list was missing a lot of cases Washington Post “Fact Checker” reporter Michelle Lee wrote Dr. Lott: “[Schilkraut] said they are still adding cases, and that it’s not a complete database.” However, Schilkraut and Elsass had already gone public with their findings about how the U.S. compared to other countries. They did so with full knowledge that they were missing many shootings in foreign countries.  Not only did they miss cases, but Vox also doesn’t put the numbers for different countries on a per capita basis.  It is startling that Vox puts other numbers in per capita terms, but not these numbers.

Here is a much more complete list of mass public shootings in the US.   For cases around the world see here.

Responding to Vox’s graphs.

1) Claim #1: “America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany”

They offer no explanation for why they compare only these 14 countries.  OECD, the club of developed countries, has 34 countries.  There are 192 countries for which homicide data is available.

Here are homicide rates across all countries for which data is available (click on figures to enlarge).  Even given the problems with homicide data not being underreported in many countries, the US homicide rate is less than the median rate and half of the mean average for all countries.

Now let’s look at the much smaller number of countries that report firearm homicide rates.  The US rate looks much higher relative to other countries, but that is primarily because the countries with the highest homicide rates are the ones that don’t report their firearm homicide rates.

Using the OECD numbers, here is how homicide rates vary.  The countries with the highest homicide rates don’t even report firearm homicides and these same countries have very strict gun control regulations.

The US homicide rate is high, though the most important question here is how homicide rates vary with gun ownership.  Vox doesn’t deal with this until point #6.  Since it pertains to the homicide data that we have just discussed, we will address it here.

2) Claim #6: “It’s not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths”

Here is the same figure for homicides generally, rather than just firearm homicides.  Brazil, Mexico, and Russia are excluded.  It uses the Small Arms Survey numbers despite the survey’s dramatic underestimation of gun possession rates in countries such as Israel and Switzerland, where guns possessed for decades by individuals are technically owned by the government.  We will later show how these problems bias the results towards what Vox wants to show.

The claim that more guns mean more gun deaths for countries besides the US is simply false.  Once the US is excluded, the relationship across all the other countries shows that more guns mean fewer homicides.

Note that you can also get a negative relationship across countries with the US, if Brazil and Russia are also included.

Some might object to including OECD-member Mexico as a developed country, but including it produces and an even more negative relationship.

Similarly, increasing the reported measure of firearms per 100 people for two low-homicide countries (Israel and Switzerland, to reflect the possession of guns at home) will also make this relationship negative even when the US is included and Brazil, Mexico, and Russia are excluded.

When we look at all of the surveyed countries, the Small Arms Survey shows an association between more guns and fewer homicides.

The same is true for the much smaller set of countries that report firearm homicides.

3) Claim #2: “America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world”

As mentioned earlier, countries such as Israel and Switzerland have a lot more civilian-possessed guns than civilian-owned guns.  In these two countries, the gun possession rate is higher than the gun ownership rate in the US.  But there is a bigger accuracy problem in counting gun ownership using surveys or gun registration.  There is strong evidence that most guns are never registered.

When Canada tried to register its estimated 15 million to 20 million long guns during the late 1990s, about 7 million were registered.  In the 1970s, German registration recorded 3.2 million of the country’s estimated 17 million guns.  In the 1980s, England registered pump-action and semiautomatic shotguns, but only about 50,000 of the estimated 300,000 such guns were actually registered.

Even in the US, there is evidence that surveys of gun ownership rates are not very accurate.  In many countries where gun ownership is illegal, surveys continually show zero gun ownership even when that is clearly not the case.

The bottom line is that the numbers of guns in the rest of the world is underestimated relative to the number in the United States.  So 42% is likely a huge overestimate of the US’s true share of guns worldwide.

4) Claims #3 and #4: “There have been more than 1,600 mass shootings since Sandy Hook” and “On average, there is around one mass shooting for each day in America”

As Vox notes: “The tracker uses a fairly broad definition of ‘mass shooting’: It includes not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all (excluding the shooter).”  The FBI has used two different definitions: mass shootings and mass public shootings.  Vox’s definition of a mass public shooting differs dramatically from the traditional FBI definition of in other ways.  In particular, the FBI excludes cases of gangs fighting against each other in order to focus on those cases where the point of the attack was to kill people.  The FBI wanted to focus on the types of mass public shootings that we see at schools, malls, and other public places.  This isn’t to say that gang fights over drug turf aren’t important, but the causes and solutions for them are dramatically different than for the mass public shootings that we hear about on the news.

Here is an earlier post that we put up:

5) Claim #5: “States with more guns have more gun deaths”

This figure uses purely cross-sectional data, looking at all these states at just one point in time.  But to do a proper analysis, one has to see how crime rates vary over time across all the states.  Did the states that had the biggest increases in gun ownership have the biggest increases or decreases in crime rates?  Here is part of a discussion from Dr. John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

6) Claim #7: “America is an outlier when it comes to gun deaths, but not overall crime”

While the graph doesn’t directly show the point that Vox is raising, their claim is: “the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.”

The United States has a relatively low violent crime rate compared to other developed countries.  The graph below includes the average violent crime rate across these countries (a separate break down by sexual assault, robbery, and assault is available here).  Compared to those countries the United States does have a relatively high homicide rate.  But Vox doesn’t even discuss the most obvious explanation: that the US has a bad drug gang problem.

7) Claim #8: “States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths”

As with our earlier discussions, purely cross-sectional comparisons can be very misleading.  A detailed discussion is available here.  The graph below is what you get once you account for national changes in crime rates and pre-existing differences across states.

8) Claim #9: “Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple decades”

This is correct.

9) Claim #10: “Most gun deaths are suicides”

Most firearm deaths are indeed suicides.  But Vox lumps together murders and justifiable homicides into the category of “firearm homicides.”  Obviously, justifiable homicides should be counted differently from murders.

10) Claim #11: “The states with the most guns report the most suicides”

Once again, Vox’s use of purely cross-sectional comparisons can be very misleading. Vox tries to show that states with high guns ownership have high suicide rates, but they ought to consult a notable economics paper on suicide by Cutler, Glaeser, and Norberg.  Cutler, et al. found that rural areas have both a large male-female population imbalance and also more gun ownership. They found the real cause to be the high number of partnerless, older men.

Instead of relying on surveys of gun ownership, we can use the number of concealed handgun permits as a proxy for ownership. And when we use panel data to follow states over time, we see no association between suicides and the number of concealed handgun permits.

There is a strong tendency for states with more gun control laws to have lower gun ownership rates. Yet, doing this research properly, we find that more gun laws are associated with more total suicides and are unrelated to firearm suicides.

11) Claim #12: “Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily”

Vox argues: “Perhaps the reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.”

But Vox gives a very misleading impression of the effectiveness of different suicide methods. A 1995 study looked at 4,117 cases of completed suicide in Los Angeles County during the period 1988-1991, and found that the success rate for being hit by a train is virtually the same as for a gunshot to the head or a shotgun to the chest. The study also estimated that the amount of pain and discomfort from being hit by a train was about half of either of those methods.

The second problem with these numbers is that not everyone wants to successfully commit suicide, so people can affect the success rate of the method. They may take a few extra pills, but not enough to actually kill themselves.

12) Claim #13: “Policies that limit access to guns have decreased suicides”

Vox cites two studies claiming that gun control laws can reduce suicides. One study is on Australia’s 1996/97 gun buyback and another is on Israel. But cherry-picking two studies isn’t very useful. Vox just ignores research that doesn’t support their conclusions.

This is part of a longer piece that Dr. John Lott wrote up on Australia’s buyback program (an entire chapter in “The War on Guns” covers this topic):

But looking at simple before-and-after averages of gun deaths in Australia regarding the gun buyback is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the average before it.

The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the gun buyback law went into effect. But the decline in firearm homicides and suicides actually slowed down after the buyback.

Australia’s buyback resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but after that private gun ownership once again steadily increased and now exceeds what it was before the buyback.

In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million to 5.8 million guns).

Gun control advocates should have predicted a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback, and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didn’t happen. . . .

The Israeli study is poorly done.  In 2006, Israel soldiers were stopped from taking their guns home with them on weekends.  There was a drop in suicides in 2007-2008 compared to 2003-2005, but a better study would have compared soldiers who could have taken their guns home with those who couldn’t.  The study uses only simple before-and-after averages, similar to the Australian comparisons.  No month-to-month changes are provided, so it isn’t clear exactly when the drop in suicides started.

A similar issue has already been tested in the proper way.  Permitted concealed carry is analogous to soldiers being able to take their guns home with them.  And the researchfinds no increase suicides when people are allowed to carry their handguns with them.

Vox selectively picks research and ignores that some gun control regulations, such as gunlock laws, actually cause an increase in total deaths.  In the case of locks, guns are made less accessible for self-defense.

13) Claim #14: “In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty”

Vox cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health which claims that states with more guns also have more cops die in the line of duty.  Unfortunately, this study is particularly fraudulent.  There are normal controls to account for average differences across places and across years, and this study only accounts for the average differences across places.  If both factors were accounted for, as is always done in this research, the authors would have gotten the opposite results from what they claim.

14) Claim #15: “Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early 2000s”

There are a number of surveys that show support for gun control peaked around 1998 and 1999.  The Pew survey that Vox cites is just one such survey.  Why they cut off the survey data in 2000 and don’t go back further is a puzzle that only Vox can answer.  The Gallup and CNN surveys are available here.

15) Claim #16: “High-profile shootings don’t appear to lead to more support for gun control in the long term”

The key here is “long-term.”  It is the reason why gun control groups try in the short-term to push through gun control soon after shootings.

16) Claim #17: “Specific gun control policies are fairly popular”

Given the supposed 90% support that the media tells us exists for expanded background checks, one would think that Michael Bloomberg’s well-funded ballot initiatives in 2016 in Nevada and Maine would have been slam dunks.  Yet, Bloomberg lost in Maine by 4 percent and won in Nevada by just 0.8 percent (and only then because Bloomberg’s people incorrectly promised that passing the initiative wouldn’t cost the state anything). Bloomberg’s initiative only eked out the win in Nevada because of the $20 million spent in support of it, amounting to an incredible $35.30 per vote. He outspent his opponents by a factor of three – in Maine, the $8 million he spent outdid the other side by a factor of six.