The Markswoman Misses
By MIKE PESCA at Slate
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/nra-spokeswoman-dana-loesch-is-hypocritical-in-her-media-criticism.html
"SNIP..........
But it’s because of one thing: the Bataclan theater assault. That was the act of international terrorism, which used guns, but it wasn’t exactly relevant to the debate of civilian access to firearms. You take out that one gigantic outlier terrorist attack in the time frame that Loesch mentioned, and you have four dead in France to 160 dead in the U.S. But a singular atypical incident is a horrible rebuttal to George Stephanopoulos’ premise, which was that no country in the world has these attacks with the frequency or the intensity of the United States. So that assertion was full of flaws, but Loesch did speak rapidly and confidently. She seemed to answer the questions Stephanopoulos was asking. I bet the NRA was proud of its spokeswoman at that moment.
I was wondering why she would cite that cherry-picked figure, which wasn’t too relevant for what he was asking. I found that the original assertion was created and spread by the Crime Prevention Research Center, whose president and founder is John Lott. John Lott has a doctorate in economics. He’s frequently cited by gun enthusiasts for his studies, which back up their worldview. But his studies also can’t be duplicated and are indeed often heavily rebutted by established experts who are affiliated with major universities. Lott wrote a book called More Guns, Less Crime that researchers frequently fault. Why do researchers find fault with his findings? Because they can’t find his findings. Lott has an answer to why the researchers fault him. It was in his next book, The Bias Against Guns.
So who’s right? All the good researchers—in 15 or 30 studies, depending on how you count them—find fewer guns, less crime. In 2015, using stats from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital at Harvard found that firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in the states with the most guns versus in the states with the least.
In 2013, Boston University’s School of Public Health found that if you control for multiple variables, a 1 percent increase in gun ownership in a state correlates with a 0.9 percent rise in firearm homicides. But still, Lott’s rhetoric animates the pro-NRA crowd, Loesch, and also Ben Shapiro, who said on Tuesday: “This 1-to-1 correlation the left attempts to draw between the number of guns in particular society and the level of murder in a particular society just does not hold. That’s particularly true for rifles.”
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