More Guns, Less Crime Quotes

“Criminals are motivated by self-preservation, and handguns can therefore be a deterrent. The potential defensive nature of guns is further evidenced by the different rates of so-called “hot burglaries,” where a resident is at home when a criminal strikes.16 In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, almost half of all burglaries are “hot burglaries.” In contrast, the United States, with fewer restrictions, has a “hot burglary” rate of only 13 percent.”
― John R. Lott, More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Take the Colorado Springs church shooting in December 2007. A parishioner who had the minister’s permission to carry her concealed gun into the church quickly stopped the slaughter before the killer was able to enter the area where thousands of members of the congregation sat.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Overall, the problem with gun-control laws is not too little regulation, but rather that the regulations disarm law-abiding citizens. Consider a criminal who is intent on massacring people and then planning on taking his own life. He would unlikely be deterred by any penalties for violating gun regulations. For example, expelling students or firing professors for violating campus gun-free zones represent a real life-changing experience for law-abiding citizens—especially since other academic institutions will not admit or hire people who have such gun offenses on their records. But even assuming the killer survives the attack, it is absurd to imagine that after facing multiple life prison sentences or death penalties for killing people, the threat of expulsion from school will be the penalty that ultimately deters the attack.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Clearly, the weight of research in refereed scholarly journals indicates that the basic results have been replicated, which is a central scientific criterion for evaluating an argument. Critics of the more-guns-less-crime thesis have not been content, however, to limit themselves to whether the basic findings stand up against legitimate examinations by others. Instead, they have sought to find chinks in the armor. When even that has not succeeded, they have engaged in misrepresentations and the casting of aspersions. To be blunt, the debate, such as it is, has unfortunately become personalized rather than sticking to the merits of the case—on which my opponents have no case to make.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“During this attempted robbery, the victim, who holds a concealed weapons permit, pulled out his weapon and fired shots into the bad guy,’ said Orange County Sheriff’s Office Commander Paul Hopkins. . . . For the bad guys out there, you never know who you’re dealing with,’ Hopkins said. ‘When you go out to commit this crime, you might be the one who’s lying dead in the parking lot.’”83”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Permit holders committed murder at 1/182nd the rate of the general public.78 This is an amazing difference.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“demonstrate the exact opposite point that the Brady Campaign is making—that permitted concealed handguns, in fact, help to protect people from getting killed when attacked.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“We find only one policy that effectively accomplishes this: the passage of right-to-carry laws.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Six months ago, who would have thought that Handgun Control would be rushing out studies to argue that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns would have no effect, or might have a delayed impact, in terms of dropping crimes?”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws

“Anyone who has taken a course in logical thinking has been exposed to the fallacy of arguing that because A happened (in this case, passage of a concealed-weapon law) and then B happened (the slowing of the rate of violent crime), A must surely have caused B.”
― John R. Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws