John Lott's book triggers wrath of gun opponents
Orange County Register
California USA
7 March 1999
John R. Lott Jr. doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would inspire death threats. But he's gotten more than his share of them recently, from a seemingly unlikely source.
You see, Lott gets death threats from people who hate guns.
Lott, 40, is a lanky, soft-spoken, professorial-looking guy which is appropriate, since that's exactly what he is: a professor of law and economics at the University of Chicago. Until a couple of years ago he was simply another anonymous egghead, grinding out arcane research papers for publication in obscure professional journals. Unless you subscribe to International Review of Law and Economics or Journal of Legal Studies, you'd probably never heard of him.
But then Lott published the results of his exhaustive statistical research on the relationship between crime rates and private gun ownership, particularly the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens.
Simply put, Lott concluded that an armed citizenry prevents crime and deters criminals a conclusion summed up in the title of his book, "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws."
The national news media picked up on Lott's thesis. And suddenly this obscure professor who doesn't even have a gun in his home found himself the prime target in a nasty political gunfight.
From the way many gun-control proponents reacted, you would have thought that Lott had called for the mandatory arming of preschoolers. On radio and TV and in the newspapers, they attacked and vilified both Lott and his study, calling him a tool of the gun manufacturers and his study a sloppy piece of research sometimes without even having read it.
Lott was generally philosophical about it. As he told me Thursday during a visit to Orange County, "With most academic work, you're lucky to get 10 people to read it. So it was nice to get the attention."
But perhaps naively, Lott, who is married and the father of four young boys, never expected the personal hostility he's gotten from some individual gun-control advocates.
"We started getting death threats at home," said Lott. (Presumably, the death would be effected with a knife or a club.) "People would ask if I had kids, and if they walked home from school. People would cut out articles from newspapers about gun deaths and send them to me, with a note saying, 'I hope this is you next.' ... Tuesday I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal, and I got about 40 calls.
Most of them were very nice, but some ... people just go bonkers."
Now don't misunderstand. Lott certainly isn't saying that the threats and personal attacks are representative of all gun-control advocates. He believes most of them are well-intentioned people who sincerely abhor violence of all kinds.
But gun control is an emotional issue, nationally and here in Orange County. (It may become even more emotional here in the coming weeks, when Sheriff Mike Carona unveils his program to loosen restrictions on granting permits to carry concealed weapons.)
Maybe it's a good idea for everybody to remember that even though the news media tend to portray only gun owners as potentially violent fanatics, there actually are some fanatics on both sides of the issue.
Just ask Professor Lott. Not all "gun nuts" are people who own guns.
Gordon Dillow may be reached at (714) 953-7953.
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