It’s Not the Guns with Dr. John Lott

other than Dr John Lott for this episode. He runs and started the Crime Prevention Research Center before he got into a lot of the gun research he's He started his academic journey at u C l A, where he got his bachelor's degree in economics. He went on to get both his master's and PhD from there as well.

He worked as an economist at the University of Maryland, Yale Law School, the University of Stanford, Texas, A and M We're in business school, all these different places, right, So he starts at a place really from digging in the numbers. That that's what he loves, that's what he does. He had also worked as a chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission. So we're going to get into all of this stuff with him. What would actually prevent

the next public mass shooting? What's the profile of a mass shooter. Why did these keep happening? And are they happening more since Columbine or is the media just covering the more. So I've got a lot of questions for Dr John Lott. We're also going to get into, you know, the latest proposal from Congress, this bipartisan proposal, things like red flag laws, you know, do they allow for due process? So I've got a whole host of questions for him,

Dr John Lott. He knows the data, he knows the research, and he's going to give it to us on this show. Dr Lot, I'm really looking forward to having this conversation because after mass shootings, there's always these calls we have to do something, we have to do something, But what if that do something doesn't stop the next mass shooting? You know? So I really want to just have a data driven conversation, not an emotional conversation, but a data driven one with you. And I know that's what you

do at the Crime Prevention Center. So I appreciate you joining the show. Sure, yeah, no, thanks for having me on. Uh right, Look, everybody wants to go and stop these attacks. Uh, but what you want to do is do something that's relevant for stopping them, and uh, you know you have this push for things like universal background checks. Um, it's been kind of the game go to type of legislation

that they wanted. But yet there's not one mass public shooting this century that would have been stopped if such a law had been in effect, these background checks on the private transfers of guns, And yet they keep bringing it up, and it makes one begin to think that they have reasons other than trying to stop these types of attacks that are motivating it. Why is the focus always Okay, well, the answer is getting rid of guns, are limiting the ability to own them to some degree.

I think they want to get rid of guns. If they wanted to pass something like a universal background check, these background checks on private transfers of guns. I've been telling them for over twenty years how they could easily get something like that passed if they made a few reasonable changes. I mean, they keep on saying, we just want reasonable gun control. Well, I can give you a few extremely reasonable fixes to the bills that they have

that would make it easy to get it passed. But they refused to do that, and it kind of convinces me over time that they really don't care about things like universal background checks per se. They care about making it costly for people to be able to go and get guns. You know, we're talking about, obviously the desire to put more laws on the books, but how many gun laws do we currently have on the books and to what extent are we following them. We have a lot of laws that I guess it depends how you

want to count them. Uh. Uh. There's a guy named Alan Corwin who goes around and kind of counts the number of words in different uh gun laws, either federally or in the state. He doesn't do it for all the states, but I mean for states like California may literally have hundreds of thousands of words, uh dealing with the gun control laws just at the state level. And you probably have thousands of gun control laws if you count local ordinances and restrictions people have locally in counties

or cities on guns. Um. But nobody has really ever gone through and systematically counted all the laws uh in

any way. It's just I mean, we have a lot, um and you know, my concern is that a lot of the problems that we have are due to existing gun control laws like these gun free zones that are there, and rather than going back and undoing the existing laws, the push seems to be, well, we need yet even more laws that will fix the problem, and they cause more problems, so you know, just kind of continue in

the background check stuff. As an example, UM, if my research convinces me of anything, it's the two groups of people benefit the most from having guns. One of them are poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas. The very people who are most likely victims of violent crime, according to my research, are the ones who benefit the

most from having guns for protection. Police are extremely important, but if you talk to the police or look at surveys of police, police themselves understand they virtually always arrive on the crime seen after the crimes committed, and so what's the safest course of action for them to take? And it turns out having a gun is by far the safest course of action. So we have the errors in the background check system I was talking about, but

we also have the costs. If you live in Washington, d c. Lisa, Let's say you and I lived in d c UH and I'm going to give you a gun. It costs a hundred twenty five dollars to go through a background check. Now, just to give you an idea of how these laws are purposely set up to make it difficult for people to get guns. Let's say now I'm going to give you four guns. So it's just John giving Lisa four guns, one person giving one other

person the guns. You think it's just one background check because the same person is getting all the guns from one person. But no, they require a separate background check on each gun. So if I'm going to give you four guns, that is going to cost five hundred dollars rather than a I mean, there's like no logical reason to me why you should have to require a separate background check on each gun, right than just on the

one person who's getting the guns. Uh. But you know, it's just an example where they kind of purposely go out of their way to make it costly. Now, look, if you believe that is going to control I advocate say that the background checks are important for stopping crime, and I don't believe that. But if you do believe it, then presumably you want to encourage people to go out of their way, not to just to make it for me to give you the guns, but to go and

find a license dealer and make the transfer through them. Um, you want to encourage people to do that, Well, how is making people pay a tax essentially encouraging them to go and obey the law? Or you know, if you if you believe it reduces crime, it reduces crime for everybody, not just the law abiding individual who's going out of

their way to go and do the background check. Well, how how is making them, the person who's obeying the law bear the entire freight of paying for this accomplishing that if if as an economist, I would say, if everybody benefits, everybody should pay, you know, pay for this out of general revenue. But they will fight you. They will fight you against this. Okay, quick commercial break back

with Dr John Lott on the other side. The reason I had asked you about the gun laws is, you know, we we look at prosecutors in major cities across America that aren't prosecuting criminals right now. So it's just hard to imagine that increasing the amount of laws in the books will do anything when we already you know, have essentially lawless cities across America. But I want to get into some of the basics of mass shootings with you and just go through some basic questions on this. You know,

the first is how are mass shootings to find? Well, you have two definitions. You have mass shootings and you have mass public shootings. Mass shooting are any shooting that occurs where you have four more people killed other than the murderer. Usually now there's a place called the and that's been the traditional FBI definition. Uh. Now you have a place called the Gun Violence Archive, which is a gun control group, which is what the media sites all

the time, and they have their own definition. They have three or more people shot, either wounded and or killed. Um, and that's the definitely, that's the number that you hear when they say, well, we've had two hundred mass shootings or something this year. Um. Mass public shootings is a narrower definition. And what that tries to get at are these attacks that occur at a mall or school or a movie theater or something where the point of the attack is simply to kill as many people as possible.

And um, so as public is four more people killed in a public place, not involving some other type of crime or like a gang fight over drug turf. You know what most people miss is that the mass shooting about eighties seven percent of those are gang fights over drug turf, and the vast majority of the rest are things like a robbery which resulted in the death of multiple people and uh or in the case of the gun violence archived just woundings or whatever. And uh. Now

are gang fights over drug turf important? Yeah, sure, any time people get killed is important, But the causes and solutions of gang fights over drug turf are very different than the causes and solutions to things like stopping these mass public shootings. Um. You know, getting rid of gun freeze owns I think is important for stopping these mass public shootings. But you know, the notion that you're going to easily get rid of the guns that drug gangs have, UM,

isn't really serious. Well and if you look at you know, these public mass shootings. Have we seen more of them increase since colibine or is it just or coverage of them has increased? The rate of mass public shootings has been fairly constant. You had a little bit of an increase around twenty and it's gone back down again. Um. And uh, you had some increase around the same time, and the number of people killed but you know, one

thing I think needs to be clear. Over the last couple of weeks or a few weeks, there's been kind of this theme in the media that the United States is unique in terms of mass public shooting. So that's that's simply false. Um. You have a number of countries in Europe that have higher per capita rates of mass public shootings in the United States hip per capita rates

of public school shootings than the United States. Um. The problem that people make in these comparisons is that usually the media and gun control people and Democrats will just talk about the number of attacks. But you have to take into account is that the United States has over three people. Um. There are a lot of countries in Europe that have five million people or six or eight million people. Germany, which is the most populous country in Europe,

has has eighty million people. Uh, So that's less than the fourth of the population in the United States. If you look at mass public school shootings since two thousand, there have been nine in the United States. Uh, there have been three in Germany. Uh. The most deadly one had eighteen people killed, The second most deadly one had fifteen people killed. Then you have another one where there's

four killed. Uh, you multiply three times four, you get twelve. Uh. You know, you have a country like Finland, which has had a couple uh school shootings. Um, they have five million people in the country. They have one the population that the United States has. You know, it's kind of like people if you with the news media compared the number of murders in Rhode Island or let's say, Wyoming

with Texas or California, presumably not. You know, if you're going to compare it across states, people know you'd put it in per capita terms, but for some reason they refuse to do that when when they're talking about these mass public shootings, probably because it's about the narrative as

opposed to getting the truth out to the public. You know, I wanted to ask you, is the contigient or the copy of cat affects real with some of these when you look at the public mass shootings like these school shooters, or is that a real thing? There's no doubt. I mean you just have to read their diaries and manifestos and other things that they leave time after time after time. The murderers will say, if I can only kill more people than such and such killed, I can get more

media attention. So you look at the Sandy Hook killer. He had He had been planning his attack for over two and a half years. According to police, he had put together the equivalent of a doctoral dissertation where he had looked at mass public shootings over the previous forty years. UM. He had apparently graft out the relationship between the number of people killed in attacks and the amount of media

coverage that they had gotten. In His goal, according to one police report, was to go and kill more people than the Norway killer had killed. He he the Norway killer, if you ignore the bombing deaths, had shot to death sixty seven people. That's more than any mass public shooting in the United States. And uh, and he was hoping that if he could kill more people than the Norway killer had killed, that he could get even more worldwide

media attention. UM. You know, at some point along the line, I mean, we've always had people who want to go and commit suicide, but at some point along the line, several decades ago, UM, there were a group of people that knew they wanted to go and commit suicide, but realized that they could commit suicide in a way that people at least would know that they were here. And Uh, they talked about, well, my name will be in the

history books. People will know that I was important, Um, that I mannered so many When you read the diaries or statements from these other murders, Um, they just don't feel appreciated. Uh. You know, women won't go out on dates with them or something, or they you know, people won't be their friends or whatever. Um. And you know, you read the diaries and stuff, and you realize, well, there's a pretty good reason why people your friend, you're

a really strange guy. But the but they want to commit suicide in a way that people will know that they were here. And so they discovered that they could get massive news attention by killing lots of people, and so they planned these things. Six months is a short amount of time for them to plan it. Uh. Many of them plan for a year or two years or more. Um. And they pick and they go through detailed planning. Uh.

They case places beforehand. You have, like you or a Batman movie theater shooter, he had cased multiple movie theaters before he went in there. He picked the one. There were seven movie theaters that were showing the premiere of the Batman movie within a twenty minute drive of his apartment. He picked the one movie theater that banned permanent concealed handguns.

Um you see the same thing over and over again, the the Omaha, Nebraska mall shooting, or the uh St Louis mall shooting, or the Salt Lake City mall shooting, or the um uh the Portland, Oregon mall shooting. You may have, you know, five six malls in an area, and only one or two will have signs posting banning permier concealed handguns. And so where do they go? Well, and that's also yeah, the one that doesn't have or

the gun free zones. And that makes sense because you know, if you just look at it from a common sense standpoint, if you're looking to inflict mass harm, you go to the easiest place to do it. So I feel like that's you know, common sense. Yet a lot of lawmakers can't seem to grasp that concept. But you talked about some of the background of some of these public mass shooters. What's the typical profile for what is there a typical profile?

There's no typical age. You know, people are focusing right now because of a couple of recent attacks on people who are under twenty one. But if you look at all the mass public shooters over the last twenty five years, the most common age rage is five. The next most common age rage is thirty six to forty, the next one is umtet and then only at that point do you get to sixteen to twenty. Um. Uh. You know you have mass public shooters who are in their sixties

out there. Uh. As far as other parts of the profile, they're overwhelmingly male. Uh. You know, like nineties seven percent or so are male. Um Uh. There are people that have no real political or religious views. Um. You know, we keep on hearing white supremacists. You have if you look at people who are anything from white supremacists, neo Nazis, or just people who are upset about illegal immigration. Uh, you get about nine percent of the mass public shooters.

Um Uh. Muslims who are doing it because of radical views on Muslim things are about nine percent of the population to their make up about half of one percent of the population, but they make up nine percent of the mass public shooters. Um. But overwhelmingly you just have people who to commit suicide and who want to do it in a way that's going to get them attention. Uh.

That's that's the overwhelming common view that's there. Uh. The other thing is, over the last twenty five years, over half the mass public shooters were actually seeing mental health care professionals prior to their attack. And yet and not one single case where mental health care professionals able to identify those individuals as a danger to themselves or others. Why. Well,

there's a whole academic literature on that. Uh. And and the explanation is usually, well, um, people with mental health problems are usually on average, less violent than the general population. They're actually more likely to be victims of violence than the general population themselves. Um. And it's just such a rare thing, they'll say. They'll say, look, Uh, they're about two and a half in schizophrenics in the United States

in any given year. And yet if you look over the last twenty five years, there's really only one clear case of a schizophrenic uh committing a mass public shooting and uh one other one. Whether is at least an argument to be made that he may have been Um. But uh, you know, if I were to say, okay, of these two point five million people, pick the thousand most likely ones to go and do it. Even if you get a guy who's in the thousand that you pick, you'll still be wrong nine out of the thousand times.

And that's usually the type of argument that you see being provided by mental health care professionals. Um, you know, here's the thing. I have no problem with people spending more money on mental health care for people. Uh, it's just that, you know, it's pretty hard to believe that you're going to catch most of these people beforehand, or even a small fraction of them. And so to me, the question is, what's your backup plan? What do you

do if you can't identify these individuals beforehand? And that's where allowing people to protect themselves comes in. If you can't, if you can't, if you really have very little hope of identifying these individuals beforehand, what what do you do if you can't catch them? Quick break more data on

public mass shootings. I guess you know. My concern is when we start getting into some of the mental health conversations, like with the Senate proposal that they just put out, including you know, funding and encouraging of things like red

flag laws. I mean, we just got through a time period with COVID where you know, I didn't get the vaccine right, and like Democrats wanted to find me, wanted to confine me to my home, wanted to potentially imprison me just for questioning vaccine efficacy, wanted to put me in a designated facility, and if I had kids, would want to take away my kids for me simply because I don't share the same opinion as they did on

the vaccine. So the concern for me when you look at red flag laws or you give increased authority to mental health officials to flag people, is could they flag me simply because I hold different opinions than they do. Well, I suppose anything as possible. Look, as far as I'm concerned, you already have a better law on the books for dealing with this than red flag laws. Uh. They go

by different names in different states. Uh. Oh, states to call them Baker Act or in California it's called where if somebody's concerned about the behavior of somebody, either that they believe that they're danger to themselves or somebody else. Uh, they can go and contact the police. The police will come in and evaluate if they have what's called a reasonable suspicion about the person. Uh, then they'll take them to a mental health care professional who will evaluate them.

Either one or two will evaluate them, and then if there's additional concerns at that point, there can be an immediate hearing. Um. If you can't afford a lawyer, one is provided for you, and a judge at that point has a broad range of options. He can say, look, I'm concerned, Uh, I want you to go and see a mental health expert. Um, and then we'll have you come back in in a couple of weeks and we'll evaluate how your treatment's going. At that point. Um, they

could in theory, take away somebody's guns. They could uh involuntarily commit you in the most extreme cases. Um. What red flat laws do is they sensely strip out all those protections that are there. Um. Red flag laws are virtually always used regarding concerns about suicide. And Uh. What happens is is that somebody will make a complaint. The complaint will be given to a judge. All the judge sees in front of them is the written complaint doesn't

question the person. There's no cross examination that's there. The judge solely based on the written complaint will make a decision whether or not to take away a person's guns. So you don't even know that there's a complaint until the police show up at your house at five am in the morning. And uh, and then maybe within a month, Uh, there'll be a hearing in which to decide whether or not to make the order permanent or not. Uh. No lawyers are provided for you. You have to go in

the higher one yourself. I've talked to lawyers involved in these types of cases. You're talking about legal fees that will be around tenth thousand dollars or so to handle a hearing like that. Um. And what you find is that the vast majority of people UH don't hire lawyers to go and represent them because the only thing that happens with the red flag law is that your guns are taken away. So you may value your guns, but you know, is it really worth ten thou dollars to you?

A few people are going to say yes it is. UM. The problem is, if you are concerned about somebody being suicidal, is it really a serious solution just to say, well, I just I'll take away their guns. I mean, if somebody is suicidal. Uh, there's so many different ways that people can commit suicide, and the notion that's simply taking away their guns solves the problem is not a serious response. And they don't involve mental health care professionals in any

part in the process. Only a couple of a state red flag laws even mentioned mental illness. And they don't even provide in any of these places for mental health care professionals to be involved any place in the process. Uh. You know, I think it's a couple of things they're going on. One is, um, it's a lot easier to write a new law that doesn't have any civil rights protection than it is to go and remove uh civil

rights protections from existing laws. Uh. And the other thing is, I think gun control people want to make laws that where they said, well, if we just take away the gun, then the problem is solved because the guns are the problem. And that's that's just silly stuff. I mean, it's just irresponsible, I think to frame things that way. But that's they're

their modus operandi, that's the way they operate. That's the image that they want to get across to people, right, And I wanted to you talked previously for the red flag laws that states already have these laws on the books. Does every state have you know, some law you know, in lieu of a you know, a red flag type thing. Does every state have a law in the books currently addressing being able to take a gun away from someone

who is, you know, maybe mentally deranged or whatever. Every state and the federal government has these Baker Act type laws. Every state does. Now. You know, if they were serious about dealing with mental health issues, what they would say is, Okay, maybe we need more funding for mental health facilities or something. Maybe they'd make some tweak I don't know what it would be because they never focus on that. Uh. Nobody kind of forces them to go and debate those types

of issues. Um, but uh uh, you know I would uh, that would be my approach. But you know, if you have some problem, if you think that there's a reason you need this new law, fine state what it is and maybe we can make an adjustment to the existing law. But no, they won't do that. Their approaches to have this new law that kind of guts all these civil

rights protections that are there. Obviously, had the federal assault weapons bad it was in place for a decade, What impact did that have and would banning air fifteens have any impact? Well, it didn't have any effect. Even studies paid for by the Clinton administration weren't able to find any effect on any type of violent crime or on

mass public shootings. Um. And you know it's you know, the bizarre thing is you have after the Buffalo shooting, which, by the way, if you read as manifesto, Uh, he talks about using an air fifteen precisely because he thought it would get people the most upset. He knew that it would lead to more calls for gun control. Um. And uh you know he uh he bought a New York state compliant a R fifteen. Uh. New York has more stringent assault weapons ban than the original federal one.

And so you know, we're kind of treated to this uh spectacle of Biden going to Buffalo and calling for an assault weapons ban and saying, if we only had an assault weapons ban, uh, we wouldn't have attacks like the one in Buffalo, and New York already has an assault weapons ban, and nobody in the press even asks

him about that contradiction that's there. Um. Look, uh, when you go from the ten years before the assault weapons ban to the ten years that it was in effect, there's absolutely no change in the number of attacks mass public shooting is using assault weapons. Um. You would think if, uh, if the assault weapons ban were driving any dropped, that

you would see in the number of attacks. Uh, you would see a drop in the percentage of mass public shootings using assault weapons because some of the people who may have used assault weapons so called assault weapons, would have switched to other types of guns. If you look over the last twenty five years of mass public shootings involve a rifle of any type, um, Uh, fifty eight percent involve handguns. UM. So they're not even the ones

that are most likely used in these attacks. They could switch to something else that you can't have a drop in the total without a drop in the percentage of attacks using these so called assault weapons. In fact, actually during the band, the percentage of attacks using assault weapons it up, and after the band they went down, which

is the exact opposite pattern. People can see all the data at our website at crime research dot org if they're interested, but um, you know it's if you go back and know how they put the assault ament's band together. Senator Feinstein had her staff go and look through catalogs of guns and put check marks next to the guns that they thought looked particularly threatening or what have you. There's no kind of logical difference in the guns that were there that they were doing. It was purely based

on the list of guns that they named. There were based solely on how they looked. UM. Just to make clear, you know, now we're having some people like Biden talk about just banning UH. Semi automatic guns. As I mentioned before, the vast majority of guns owned in the United States are semi automatic. UM. The These are guns where one pull the trigger, one bullet comes out. It reloads itself.

One pull the trigger, one bullet comes out. So if you're talking about different types of rifles, you have manually loaded rifles where you fire a bullet and you have to physically yourself put another bullet in the chamber, you have semi automatic guns, and then you have fully automatic machine guns. None of these mass public shootings have involved machine guns. None of the crimes generally are murder is

generally involved machine guns. With the nineteen thirties has been like one murder with with the machine gun and UH. The thing is, though regular people benefit a lot from

having semi automatic guns. There's a reason why almost all the guns sold in the United States or semi automatics, and that is, if you're attacked by multiple criminals, or if you fire and miss, or if you fire and wound the attacker but don't incapacitate them, you may really wish that you could quickly fire a second bullet, and and you may not have the luxury of time to

manually reload your rifle there uh in order to fire it. Um. So you know, uh, I think a lot of these gun control laws that they push are more likely to make it difficult for law abiding citizens to defend themselves, and it's going to be uh stopping criminals. To be clear, I am not a gun owner, but I support the Second Amendment because all you have to do is look at history and see what happens once citizens become disarmed

and tyranny takes over. And so for that reason alone, I support the Second Amendment because I think it serves on a check against tyranny, and it serves on a check of keeping America free. So that's why I support guns personally. You know how challenging is it as a researcher in today's political climate, looking at the media. I mean, how much missing formation is out there? You know, how

much does that change the perception? And a lot of these conversations of just a lot of these reports coming from a place of you know, a lack of understanding or or from falsehoods has a huge impact. I'll give you one example. Uh. You know, the theme under the buying administration is that in order to reduce violent crime, we have to have gun control. You know, I don't know, maybe it's just because I deal with these numbers all the time. I'm just astounded by the discussion. Let's an

eight percent of violent crime involves guns. Now, I don't think that Biden's solutions even for that eight percent are going to be very useful. But you know, the way you reduce gun violence is the same way you reduce violent crime. General. You have to make it risky for criminals to go and commit crime. And you know, as you were alluding to earlier with prosecutors, you have district attorneys around the country were refusing to prosecute very violent criminals.

You've had many urban areas over half even two thirds of inmates have been released from jail's. Uh, You've had police budgets being cut. Uh. In New York City, they cut the police budget by billion dollars a year. In Chicago, Uh, in they eliminated four hundred positions uh from full time law enforcement uh there in the city. Um. You know, they've had other restrictions on how police are able to go and do their job. You've had bail reform. I mean,

the bail reform is just crazy. Um. You know the guy who drove his SUV through the Christmas crowd in Wisconsin, Um, he uh was facing charges he had been arrested for an attempted murder of the mother of his child with his car. He had tried to run her over. Uh. He was facing attempted murder charges. There. He was facing other felony charges. Uh. He's facing twenty five years or so imprisoned for all the different crimes that he was

facing already. What are you gonna do. You're gonna the twenty five years in jail that he's facing didn't stop him. But if you go and say, well, if he kills six more people and and sends sixties some people to the hospital, Um, you know, we'll give him an additional uh six life sentences. You know, if he's already essentially facing he's thirty eight years old, uh, facing twenty five years in jail. Uh. The guy, you know, the guy is gonna be in his sixties when he gets out.

Um Uh, it's almost as if he's already facing a life sentences there. Uh. And you have people you know, uh in New York or other places, they're facing long prison sentences. They get out with little or no bail. That's there. Is it surprising that they go and commit other crimes when there's really no additional penalty that you can put on them because they're already facing long prison sentences. Uh. It's just crazy stuff. But the bottom line is you

want to you want to make it risking. Biden has given four major addresses on violent crime, um and uh. In those four speeches, he's never mentioned the district attorneys once. He's never mentioned all the inmates being released from jail's once. Um he uh, he goes. He's mentioned police four times, but when he's mentioned police, it's been in terms of

them enforcing gun control laws. You know, if I were Biden when he gave his big talk in New York in February, I would have gone in and said, look, uh, you know, you've cut the police budget by billion dollars a year. You know, is it surprising that you've had any increase in violent crime that's occurred here? It's insane, you know. To take us through, so said it has released their proposal on what they want to do on you know, guns, and in their way, they're trying to

address the vol the shooting. You know, take us through. We kind of we already got into red flag laws, which is part of it. They want to try to increase and encourage states to administer red flag laws. Uh, you know they're trying to increase that. But take us through, you know, the rest of it. What do you think of it? What's your takeaway? Would any of it help, would any of it hurt? You know, kind of just take us through broadly, sort of what you think about

what you've read so far on it. The devil is going to be in the details on what they do here, and uh, you know, we're just gonna have to see what they end up coming down to. Uh in terms of the agreements, I you know, right now, it's a very vague sketch on on what they're proposing. Um, you know, they wanna Uh they're talking about things like, um uh having go after straw purchasers. I have no idea what they're talking about there. They're talking about um things like

uh uh more strictly regulating uh licensed dealers. Well, okay, again, I don't know what they mean. I mean, you look at what Biden's done on something like uh licensed firearms dealers. He's adopted so called zero tolerance approach where he's having Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco on firearms and explosive experts agents go in and check paperwork. Biden has this description of licensed dealers selling guns out of the back of their store to criminals. And that's that's what's happening. And that's

not what they're going after. They're looking to see whether they have any paperwork mistake, no matter how tiny, no matter how trivial, over let's say the last fifteen years, and if they find one mistake, you're out of business. It can be a very trivial, tiny paperwork mistake. But then they've already put thousands of of licensed gun dealers, something like five thousand or so out of business. Uh. And it's just getting going. I assume when they get the new Uh. Ahead of the a t F in there,

they'll go even more full bore on doing that. And uh. You know, UM, I don't know whether the Democrats want to try to codify that more or make it even more restringent or whatever that's going to be there. I assume the Republicans will push back. I don't know whether they will even come to an agreement on something like that. Um. So Uh they want to have changed the rules for

people under twenty one buying a gun. Um. Uh. My understanding is from this, Uh, the Texas school shooter had a felony charge that was on his record as a juvenile domestic or at least a domestic violence charge and uh, and so they want to make it so you can go and look at the juvenile records. Look, if somebody's seventeen and a half and they commit a crime, do you learn something about them when they turn eighteen? Sure? Okay, I don't think there's just because you become eighteen, we

don't learn something about things about you that you did earlier. Traditionally, what's happened is we've said if somebody makes, uh does a crime when they're fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, or whatever, Um. You know, people make stupid mistakes when they're young. We don't want them to follow that for the rest of their lives. And so we've sealed juvenile records that are there.

So much of the gun control debate focuses on one particular or instant as far as I know, in the last twenty five years, Um, the Texas school shooting is the only case where we had somebody who had a juvenile record like that, who, in theory, could have been prevented from legally at least obtaining a gun. Uh if this had been including his records. My impression is that Democrats want to make this a ban for all ages.

Um uh you know, and so you just have an additional thing that they put on that's going to disqualify people for life from only a gun. So you know, you've we talked about mental illness before. If if you have a problem, let's say when you're eighteen or twenty, and you're involuntarily committed, your ban for your life from being able to go and own a gun, it may

have been a one time, transitory thing that occurred. Uh. You may be perfectly fine when you're thirty or forty or fifty but you're still banned for life from being able to go and have a gun. Um. So you know, I understand uh that we can learn stuff about people

from their behavior when they're a juvenile. Um. The question is going to be where do you end it and how do you make sure it's ended at that point because once you kind of unseal these juvenile records and they're put into these other systems, I'm not sure how easy it is to go and remove it. So would the number one thing be to to stop these school shootings,

to get rid of gun free zones? I mean, look, we we did a report where people can find it out our website at crime research dot org where we looked at all the discharges of firearms on school property from two thousand on um, anything from an axonal discharge by a police officer all the way up to a mass public school shooting. And uh, Um we have twenty states, including uh parts of Texas where you have armed teachers and staff. Of the schools in Texas have armed teachers

and staff. But this attacker picked a school where teachers and staff were banned from being able to go and have guns. UM. So you literally when you look at these thousands of these twenty states, you have thousands of schools that have armed teachers and staff. You cannot find one attack where anybody has been wounded or killed anywhere near during school hours when teachers would be around. UM at as any of those schools where teachers and staff

are armed. All the school shootings, every single one where anybody's been wounded or killed has occurred at uh at places where teachers and stay for a band from having guns. Look, you have two different types of signs that you put in front of schools. Either they have signs that say this school is a gun free zone, or you have a sign that says warning, select teachers and staff are carrying concealed handguns and we'll use them to go and uh protect students and others here at the school. UM.

You know. UH, a lot of people, even Republicans, are saying, well, we need to have one police officer in each school. I don't think people appreciate what an incredibly difficult job having one person in uniform faces and stopping these attacks. Uh. If you have one person and only one person who is a gun and he's in uniform, he's readily identifiable. Uh. You know, we talked about the Buffalo shooting. The Buffalo shooter had cased the grocery store. He knew that there

was one arm guard there. He knew where the one armed guard was stationed in uniform. Who do you think he took out first? They know if they take out the one person in uniform first, they're gonna have free rein to go after everybody else because they're the only person with a gun in these places. You know, if you're gonna have a guard at a place, or a police officer, for for heaven's sakes, don't put them in uniform. Don't make them readily identifiable. If you're gonna have one

police officer, make them a gym teacher or something. Okay, uh so they blend in, uh so that the attackers don't know who it is that they have to go and try to take out first. These attackers have real strategic advantages if you're if you're a police officer and you're guarding an elementary school. I mean, talk about a boring job. You know, day after day, week after week, month after month, nothing happens. It's hard to be on your hose all the time there. You don't have eyes

in the back of your head. We're talking about one guard. It's very expensive to put one full time police officer in each of these schools and uh and the benefit is relatively small. And besides, if you have teachers and staff caring, you make the job of at one uniformed

officer much safer because the attackers. You put your signs out in front of the school, warning the attackers, because what happens is the attackers have to reveal their position when they start firing at the officer, and they have to worry that maybe somebody behind them or to the side, somebody that they can't identify to begin with. Well, and we saw, you know, there's recently, you know, a Texas church shooting where a congregant was able to take out

you know, so we've seen this happen. And there's also, you know, not too long ago at a party in West Virginia, a woman with a pistol was able to take out you know. But Dr John Lytte, I really appreciate your time, you know, thank you so much for joining the show. But just one quick thing. On our website at Crime Research dot or, we have dozens of those types of cases that you're mentioning. Rarely do these cases get national news coverage, and often when they do,

the media gets it wrong. Uh. But just in the last few years, we have dozens of these cases up on our website. Uh, dramatic cases where if the people weren't there with their permanent concealed handguns we're talking about in public places, you know, they would have gotten national and international news coverage. These are cases where the police themselves have said that multiple people would have been killed if it hadn't been for the presence of the permit holder.

So just in conclusion my debate, my guess is the entire debate that we have right now would be dramatically different if the types of stories that you were just referring to got national news coverage and even once in a while and even and also if you got uh, when they cover these mass public shootings, if once in a while they would go and mention we've had yet another mass public shooting where guns are banned. It's often the easiest thing for the reporters or whatever to go

and check. Instead, they'll go and say, well, we think he used this type of gun, or we think he got it this way. Things that are often wrong. You know, these last couple of tacks, We've had multiple news stories about these guys supposedly wearing body armor. You know, Uh, the news media just completely gets this stuff wrong. They lie through their teeth and it's it's unfortunate, which is you know why we try to do segments like this on this show. Dr John lytte, I appreciate your time,

Take care, sir, have a great day. Thank you. Dr John ly So. Trying to bring you a bunch of different guests on the show to really dig into a lot of the hot button issues, the issues that impact your lives and and obviously members of Congress, literally coming from your guns as law abiding citizens is worthy of the evan episode on this show. So I hope you enjoyed the show. If you don't mind leave us a review on Apple Podcast, you can rate us five stars

as well. Please share with your family and friends. And I thank you so much for listening. And I want to thank John Cassio, my executive producer, for all the work that he does to put this together as well.