John Lott More Guns Less Crime SCOTUS NY Rifle Case Self Defense Rittenhouse Case 111821

Welcome to Chosen Generation with your host, Pastor Greg Young.

No topic is off limits and everything is filtered through biblical glasses. And now here's your host, Pastor Greg. And welcome to the program. Great to have you with me.

Thanks so much for being here. I know you have a choice of where you can listen each and every day. And I thank you for keeping it tuned here to Chosen Generation Radio. Well, folks, great hour of programming lined up for you.

Dr. Alveda King joins us at the bottom of the hour. If you missed any of our number one, I want to encourage you to check it out. Dr. Peter Navarro kicked things off with the program. We'll have the audio and so forth up relative to Dr. Navarro. And Sheena Rodriguez was with us as we talked about issues happening down at the Texas border. So all of that for you in our number one, you can find it at the website chosengenerationradio.com.

That's chosengenerationradio.com. Joining me now and I'm very pleased to have him. He is the founder of Crime Prevention Research.

He also spent some time working within the Trump administration. And it's my pleasure to welcome an expert on the issue of firearms and gun crime and really telling the truth about what guns do and what guns don't do. And it's my pleasure to welcome John Lott to the program.

John, welcome. So good to have you. Thanks for being here. Good to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely.

Absolutely. You wrote a book. I spent a number of years now, but you wrote a book 23 years ago called More Guns, Less Crime, published by the University of Chicago Press. And the U.S. Supreme Court has just heard a case, the New York Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin, and your book really talked about this.

It was in some ways, I think, prophetic to this particular case. Talk to me about the similarities between what you wrote in your book and the issue that is at hand and why this is such an important case for us to understand. Well, what my book covered and what the case involves are the same thing. My book looked at states switching from so-called may issue to what are called shall issue laws, which are basically may issue laws like they have in New York and six other states require that you have to provide what's called proper cause, which just means a good reason to some public official for why you should be able to have the opportunity to go and carry a gun for protection outside your home. The shall issue states don't have that requirement.

What they have is objective rules like you're a certain age, you pass criminal background checks, you pay your fee, you do whatever training is required. Once you've met those criteria, it's up to you to determine whether or not you want to get a concealed handgun permit. In the seven may issue states, you have to go to either a judge or to a sheriff or a police chief and explain to them why you have a good reason to want to have protection. In New York, simply living in a dangerous area is not considered a good reason. You have to have a specific threat against you, a specific death threat, for example, against you in order to go and get protection. Simply saying, as one of the plaintiffs in this case said, look, you know, there have been a number of robberies in my area just down the street and, you know, I'm concerned for my safety.

That doesn't cut it. And of course, in New York, you have a lot of cases where people have even received death threats. John Stossel, when he worked for Fox News a few years ago, had done a couple episodes on environmental regulations and literally got dozens of death threats. He went to pay this $400, went to the local NYPD there in New York City, and they said, yeah, OK, you have all these threats, but we don't think any of the threats rise to a sufficiently serious level that you should get a concealed handgun permit. The type of people who go and get concealed handgun permits are celebrities, people who are politically connected and powerful.

So Arthur Scholzberger from The New York Times will get one, Robert De Niro will get one, heads of labor unions get them. You know, and a few years ago, I was able to get a list of all the concealed carry permit holders at Los Angeles County in California. California is another one of the main issue states. They only have 341 concealed handgun permits and an adult population of about 8 million. But when you look at the permits, they're basically people who gave large amounts of money to the sheriff's reelection campaign.

They're very wealthy, very politically connected individuals who are overwhelmingly white males. Well, and they're people who speak out against guns. The same people that are going to get concealed carry permits are the very same people that are on the vocal side of we need more gun restrictions. We need to get guns off the street and so on and so on and so on.

And yet there they are. And you know, in the case of Alec Baldwin, obviously this is someone who paid absolutely no attention to simple standard operating procedures of checking the gun, making sure that there is not live ammunition in the gun. I mean, these are basic simple steps that are the first thing that you learn when you purchase a weapon. Well, Alec Baldwin violated the most basic safety rules. You can go and blame somebody else, but he's the one who held the gun. He's the one who pulled the trigger.

He's the one who aimed it. If you read the Actors Union rules on that, he clearly violated them. I mean, he's been an actor for 40 years. He's handled guns.

He's been with trained people on the set over many, many decades. You know, he knows you don't directly point a gun at anything that you don't have an intention to shoot. He knows that, as you say, you're supposed to assume that the gun is loaded, whether it is or isn't.

Always. And he could have checked it himself. But, you know, there are lots of mistakes there. You know, what I was going to say about Los Angeles is that only only seven percent of the concealed carry permit holders that they gave that they thought had a good reason to have a gun were women. Only five percent were blacks. If you look at the so-called shall-issue state, what you find is about 30 percent of permit holders are women. You find about 12 percent of permit holders are blacks. So, you know, here you have a situation, you have it in other places, where you have Democrats running the system for determining who has a good reason. That's pretty much exclusively the people who are running these things in these seven-may-issue states.

They're heavily Democratic states. And, you know, they claim that they care about women, they claim that they care about blacks. But yet, for some reason, they don't think that the women who come to them have very good reasons for having a gun for protection. They don't think that blacks do. You know, so when women have a choice on determining whether or not they have a good reason themselves for getting a permit, you know, almost 30 percent of permit holders are women.

Yet, you know, they don't think that they have a good reason when, you know, they have to give a good reason. Part of the issue, John, excuse me, part of the issue is that they're always using flawed statistics as well. And this is one of the things that you point out in your analysis and on the Crime Research Prevention website, or Crime Prevention Research website. It's crimeresearch.org, correct? Right, crimeresearch.org. But on there, and for years now, you have pointed out how they use flawed statistics in order to support and try to sway public opinion. Can you talk a little bit about some of the statistics that they use and where the flaws are relative to shooting issues?

Sure. Well, I mean, you can just look at the oral arguments that were occurring before the Supreme Court on the New York case. Justice Breyer, who I used to work for when I was at the U.S.

Sentencing Commission, he was one of the judges who were overseeing it. He was asking a question. He said, well, you know, you have a football or a soccer game, people drink, and then they get into an argument, and then somebody's going to pull out a permanent concealed handgun and shoot other people. You know, so much of the gun control debate that we have is about things that might possibly go wrong.

Well, we don't need to guess. I mean, we've got 21.5 million American adults who have a concealed handgun permit. We've had these laws for many, many decades. And yet, I can't find a single case like what Justice Breyer described there. Is it possible? Sure, it's possible. But is it likely? I mean, you think if it was even remotely likely that people could easily point to at least one case that would be similar to what he was talking about. If you go and read the amicus briefs supporting New York's law, you only find like one sentence in one of the briefs that even tries to respond to the evidence that concealed handgun permits are extremely law abiding. And it does a really poor job.

I mean, it just it doesn't really directly respond to that. What all it does is that the rate of conviction for certain crimes by permit holders is higher than it is for other crimes. But what they fail to know is it's incredibly low for all the crimes.

You're talking about, you know, differences in something that's an incredibly small number. Permit holders are convicted of firearms related violations at about 112. The rate that police officers are convicted of firearms related violations. Wow. Yeah.

And police are rarely convicted of firearm violations at about 120 at the rate of the general population. So, you know. Yeah, it's outrageous.

Yeah, it's really outrageous when they make these these comments. When we get back, John, if we could, because there's there's there's some other stuff that's going on relative to guns in our country. And that is that now in Illinois, apparently, if you're a mutual combatant, you're not going to be charged if you go shooting one another up or actually shooting bystanders if you're mutual combatants.

But but I want to address with you the issue of who these mutual combatants tend to be and and whether or not they fall under the category of legal gun owners, which we have that answer back with that. Hi, this is Michael, creator of Michael's MNP supplements. Let's talk energy. Do you wake up tired even after a full night's sleep? Does keeping up with your family and or your job leave you exhausted by noon?

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You can find it at crimeresearch.org. And John, just briefly I had a question with you about the mutual combatants. I want to touch on that briefly but then I also want to get into the Rittenhouse case. And how significantly important that is relative to the issue of self-defense.

And I guess the two have some relationship with one another. When you consider the fact that these people involved in mutual combatant type issues are generally illegal carriers of weapons. Well the case that you're talking about occurred in Chicago recently. You had two rival drug gangs fighting against each other over drug turf. It was caught, it occurred during broad daylight, caught on high definition video. You actually had some police officers there who witnessed the fighting. One person was killed, several people were seriously injured. But Kim Fox, the District Attorney for Cook County, her office refused to prosecute them initially. The initial explanation was, as you say, mutual combatants that were there. It was basically all gang fights over drug turf in Chicago. You wouldn't be able to prosecute anybody even if people get killed or seriously wounded.

It was ridiculous. They ended up backing away from that and ended up saying that it just wasn't sufficient evidence. The problem is, as Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who no one would classify as a moderate, let alone a conservative on law enforcement type issues. She used to be a prosecutor there.

She said, look, I was a prosecutor, how much more evidence can you possibly have than this high definition video that shows who was shooting at each other as well as having police being eyewitnesses for this? But, you know, Kim Fox is one of these Soros supported prosecutors. They believe that law enforcement is inherently racist. And so you can't go and prosecute minorities. And, you know, the problem you have is who does she think the victims of these criminals are? They're overwhelmingly minorities themselves.

And, you know, their lives are being destroyed by what's happening in these areas. And, you know, if you make it so that you rarely arrest these criminals who are committing murder, you know, only 20 percent of murders in Chicago end up in arrest. The rate for arrest for gang members who engage in murder is even lower than the average. And then you don't even prosecute all of them.

Well, guess what? It's not risky for them to go and commit crimes. And you're going to see a lot more crime occurring. It's a simple reason why Chicago has the high, you know, violent crime rate that it does.

So and again, the people whose businesses are being destroyed. I mean, what part of town is this occurring? It's a black area. Many of the businesses are owned by blacks. The people who work in those areas are black.

The people who primarily shop in those areas are primarily black. You know, it's poor people, poor minorities who are being really badly harmed by not discouraging criminals from committing crimes. And let's make the transition, because we've only got a couple of minutes left now, but let's make the transition over into the Rittenhouse case. Because here's a young man who came down, came into Kenosha, a place where he was a lifeguard, a place where he was actively involved in the community and heard from other friends about what was happening, the things you described, businesses being burned down and so on and so forth, and came initially and had a first aid bag, but he also had a weapon with him, not that he brought with him, but a weapon that was given to him by a friend there in Kenosha, and he had that with him as well because there was a concern about everyone's safety. And yet those are the kinds of things that are attacked when you have, again, up in Illinois, a situation where illegal carriers of weapons and turf wars are somehow allowed. Well, I mean, the whole trial's been atrocious. The prosecution has violated one rule after another. The media has done a very poor job of covering this stuff. And just the last day or so, one of the big debates has been that the prosecution had drone footage where they turned over low-quality footage to the defense and kept high-quality, high-definition drone footage for themselves on this. And it's just, you know, before you had the prosecution actively questioning Brittenhouse not talking to the media, somehow if that was improper, I mean, any lawyer will tell their defendants, do not speak to the media, do not try this in the public opinion court. And, you know, it's just one violation after another.

And the prosecution witnesses have actually appeared to provide more evidence. Are you getting up in the morning feeling like you and your bed had a bad night, still tired? Stop!

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