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Proposed bet on Brazil’s homicide rate has academics crying “it’s complicated”

May 23, 2023 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, has a challenge for anti-gun academics: put your money where your mouth is.

Lott takes issue with a claim by Daniel Webster, the head of Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University, who asserted in a Washington Post column back in December that in the country of Brazil “every 1 percent increase in firearm ownership is associated with a 0.6 percent increase in overall homicide rates.” According to an interview with Fox News Digital, Lott was so taken aback by the claim that he decided to see how many anti-gun researchers would be willing to test Webster’s theory now that Jair Bolsanaro’s generally pro-gun policies have been upended by new president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who’s cracked down on legal gun ownership since taking office.

“How could somebody with a straight face go and tell the Washington Post this is what he believes the relationship is,” Lott told Fox News Digital. “Nobody calls him on it. It was kind of what I finally saw his statement in the Washington Post, that’s what kind of got me to go and offer people the bets.”

Lott said he reached out to 12 academics in the U.S. earlier this year with a proposal: A $1,000 bet on whether the homicide rate would increase in Brazil under Lula and his administration’s gun ownership crackdown.

“Here is what I offer you. Let’s bet $1,000 and make it simple on whether the homicide rate in Brazil will go up or down during the first two years of Lula’s presidency. If the homicide rate goes down from what it was in 2022, I will pay you $1,000. If it goes up, you will pay me $1,000,” Lott wrote in his emails to fellow academics, which were provided to Fox News Digital.

“If you prefer, we can designate charities that we want the money to go to. Given the importance you put on gun control and the large percentage change in gun ownership that Lula is imposing, you should expect a substantial drop in homicides, but, as I say, let’s keep it simple on whether the homicide rate goes up or down.”

A funny thing’s happened since Lott issued his challenge. Not only have none of the academics he reached out to taken him up on his offer, many of them are now talking about complicated crime rates can be; a stark contrast to their usual assertions that imposing a particular gun control law will lead to a specific reduction in crime… or in Webster’s case, that a increase in gun ownership automatically leads to more crime.

Lott provided Fox News Digital with his correspondence with academics, including Duke University professor Phil Cook, for example, who told Lott, “I like the idea of a bet, but am not going to take this one, since I have no confidence that guns and ammo will actually become scarcer in the neighborhoods with high rates of violence.”

Indiana University’s Paul Helmke told Lott that he’s “not in the practice of making bets,” and while it “sounds like some interesting developments in Brazil,” Helmke said he is not familiar enough with the country’s data collections and crime issues.

A handful of the 12 academics responded to Fox News Digital’s inquiries on the bet, including Stanford University’s John Donohue, who said he rebutted Lott with previous crime data from Texas in the 1990s.

“I asked him why when Texas prohibited gun carrying for protection, Houston and NYC had the same murder rate in the early 1990s, but when Texas changed to be very permissive towards guns, Houston now has a murder rate three times as high as NYC. John was unwilling to concede that the pro-gun shift had hurt Texas, saying that other factors explain why it has done so poorly relative to New York,” Donohue told Fox News Digital.

“But the same would be true for Brazil. Many factors will influence crime in this relatively poor country that is going through a politically and economically turbulent time,” he added.

I think that’s one of the points that Lott was trying to make with his offer. After all, for gun control advocates the only meaningful solution to high rates of violent crime is more gun control, but Lott has pointed out that Brazil’s homicide rate actually declined after Bolsonaro loosened the country’s restrictive gun laws. I’m sure there have been a number of factors at play, but the fact remains that as more Brazilians became legal gun owners, the murder rate dropped to levels not seen in decades. That’s not supposed to happen under the “more guns, more crime” theory advanced by Webster and others, and now Lott is willing to bet that Lula’s new war on legal gun owners isn’t going to make the country a safer place.

Lott argued that one of the reasons researchers should study Brazil is due to the country’s “huge changes” to its laws, “from a [600%-plus] increase in gun ownership to a ban on gun and ammunition sales and forcing people to give up guns that they have already.”

“The idea of a bet is to see what happens before and after a change in gun control laws. The U.K. had much lower murder rates than the U.S. before they had any gun control laws, and their murder rate has actually gone up relative to the U.S. after they adopted gun control laws, such as the 1997 handgun ban,” Lott told Fox News Digital.

Harvard University’s David Hemenway told Fox News Digital that Lott’s proposal was a “silly stunt” and that homicides in Brazil are affected by “scores of factors,” such as “the economy, truces among criminal organizations, gun smuggling rates and police effectiveness in enforcing the gun laws.”

And the same holds true for the United States as well. Crime does not automatically increase year after year, despite the fact that there are millions of firearms sold in the U.S. on an annual basis. It ebbs and flows; rising dramatically from the early 1960s until the early 1990s before dropping by more than 50% between 1991 and 2020, when the COVID pandemic, civil unrest, court and school closures, and the defund the police movements helped spark a surge in violent crime that is now starting to abate.

If these researchers want to claim that “it’s complicated” I won’t disagree, but that’s a far cry from the “more guns equals more crime” ideology that the seem to hold so dear… at least when money’s not on the line. Kudos to John Lott for putting his offer out there. It’s too bad (but very telling) that none of the anti-gun academics he reached out to were willing to accept his bet on Brazil’s homicide rate.

Filed Under: <![CDATA[Brazil]]>, <![CDATA[Daniel Webster]]>, <![CDATA[Dr. John Lott]]>, <![CDATA[Gun Control]]>, <![CDATA[homicide]]>, <![CDATA[Video]]>, Bearing Arms, News

As more violent crimes go uncharged, criminals are getting away with murder

May 10, 2023 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

It was a little more than two years ago that Cody Woodson was murdered in Richmond, Virginia while taking out the trash, and police have yet to make any arrest in his killing. Sadly, that’s becoming a more and more common outcome when it comes to homicides and non-fatal shootings over the past few years as clearance rate decline in many jurisdictions.

On today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co we’re taking a closer look at the issue and what can be done to ensure that violent killers aren’t able to get away with murders like the one that robbed family and friends of a kind and gentle soul, prompted by a recent story highlighting Philadelphia’s abysmally low rate of solving homicides and non-fatal shootings.

On April 25, inside a South Philly rowhouse, Ahmad Morales’ mother, Tamika, had memories of him everywhere; photos, a painting, and charms on a bracelet.

Tamika Morales planned to get a cake decorated the next morning — Ahmad would have turned 27 on April 26.

Ahmad was 24 years old when he was killed, shot multiple times by three shooters outside of a convenience store. There was no clear motive, and no one came forward with information.

Nearly three years later, Tamika Morales doesn’t have the answers she and her family need. If the shooting was captured on good quality video, if most of a license plate is visible, and if the car the shooters rode in was identified, why has no one been brought to justice?

The WHYY story is awfully short on answers, but does provide at least a rough idea of the scope of the problem.

A 2022 report by the City Controller showed the clearance rate for fatal shootings in Philadelphia was 36.7% in 2020, the year Ahmad was killed. That number was down from 41.4% in 2015. Nineteen percent of non-fatal shooting incidents in 2020 were cleared by the PPD, meaning about 1,500 non-fatal shootings that year went unsolved.

PPD statistics from the past year show slight improvements since 2020 — arrests were made in 48.8% of homicide cases, with gun violence homicides up to 43%.

A very slight improvement, given that more than half the time murderers are still getting away with their crimes in the city of Brotherly Love.

The best way to reduce violent crime is to ensure that there are consequences, and if most cases are going unsolved then violent and prolific offenders are going to be emboldened to commit more offenses. So what can be done to improve the clearance rates in cities like Philadelphia?

Improving police staffing levels is one crucial piece of the puzzle. I don’t think its a coincidence that as more departments around the country are seeing an exodus of officers, clearance rates are declining alongside the number of uniformed officers on the street. The head of Philly’s police union says the department is understaffed by at least 1,200 officers, which not only means fewer officers on the streets but fewer investigators and detectives responsible for closing these cases.

Another issue is a lack of cooperation by witnesses. Police have long had to deal with victims who refuse to cooperate with investigators because of their own criminal history or animosity towards law enforcement, but many witnesses who would be willing to cooperate are reluctant to do so because they fear retaliation. Witness protection programs have been anemically funded for years, but even when the money is there it can go unspent, as we’ve seen in Baltimore.

Warren Alperstein a former city prosecutor says the bureaucratic back and forth is failing those in Baltimore who could be helped with this money.

“It is unbelievable to me having been a former prosecutor in that office that we’re still having this problem. We have a crime rate and murder rate exploding getting worse, it’s not getting better and yet we still have civilian witnesses who don’t feel safe,” he said. “We can’t get them to court and this money is stuck in some pipeline because government agencies can’t get together and figure it out. It’s really just horrendous to think about.”

Fixing these problems may not be easy or inexpensive, but they’d have a much bigger impact on public safety than a ban on so-called “assault weapons”, adding more gun-free zones to public locations, or imposing storage requirements on law-abiding gun owners. There’s a way to bring down the violent crime rates in places like Philly, but there’s no will among Democratic politicians who would rather use violent crime to put ineffective and unconstitutional gun control laws on the books.

Filed Under: <![CDATA[Cam &amp; Co]]>, <![CDATA[Cam Edwards]]>, <![CDATA[clearance rates]]>, <![CDATA[Gun Control]]>, <![CDATA[homicide]]>, <![CDATA[Philadelphia]]>, <![CDATA[shootings]]>, <![CDATA[Video]]>, <![CDATA[violent crime]]>, Bearing Arms, News

Colorado rock attacks show limits of gun control laws

April 21, 2023 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

A 20-year-old woman was killed and at least two other people were left with injuries in the Denver area on Thursday as the result of rocks being thrown through the windows of their vehicles, and local authorities have so far been unable to identify the suspect or suspects in the attack.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office says at least five vehicles were targeted by the unknown assailant, including the Chevy Spark driven by 20-year-old Alexa Bartell, who was on the phone with a friend when she went quiet.

Bartell’s friend “used an app to locate Alexa’s phone,” and the friend went to the location along Indiana Street, Jefferson County sheriff’s spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said. She saw Bartell’s Spark off the road in a field.

“As she approached, she could see Alexa was inside and was dead,” Kelley said. The friend dialed 911.

Two drivers injured in the other attacks suffered minor injuries. They were in good condition Thursday.

… “Rocks were thrown at windshields of moving vehicles,” Kelley said. Three of the rocks shattered windshields and remained inside vehicles. Police recovered those. “The rocks are 4 to 6 inches wide and weighed 3 to 5 pounds,” she said.

You won’t hear Shannon Watts or any other gun control activist talk about these horrific crimes; not only because they didn’t involve a firearm, but because crimes like this make it blatantly obvious that we need to be dealing with the individual and not whatever weapon they might use. Is Bartell’s death any more acceptable or excusable because some twisted soul decided to pitch a rock through her windshield instead of shooting at her? Of course not, but the gun control lobby can’t offer up any so-called solutions for these criminal acts. It’s not like we can impose a waiting period on rock purchases, or require background checks for all transfers of minerals larger than a pebble.

Horrific crimes like these also demonstrate the fundamental problem with “red flag” laws; the myopic focus on someone’s ability to legally possess a firearm instead of the supposed dangerousness that makes them a risk to themselves or others. We don’t know who’s responsible for these attacks, but it’s at least possible that the unknown suspect has already been the subject of a “red flag” order and is now roaming around chucking heavy rocks down onto the windshields of passing motorists because the courts deemed them no longer a danger to themselves or others once an Extreme Risk Protection Order was issued. “Red flag” laws aren’t really about dangerous people, and they’re certainly not about mental health. A rock can be just as deadly as a gun, but anyone subject to a “red flag” order can still pick up a chunk of granite and send it through the windshield of a moving car, stab someone with their legally-owned knife, or douse someone in gasoline and light them on fire with their lawfully-possessed matches.

Every act of wanton violence in this country is the result of choices made by an individual; whether to pull the trigger, plunge the blade, strike a blow, or hurl heavy stones. Pinning the blame on an inanimate object or believing that we can somehow criminal-proof the country as long as we pass enough gun control laws isn’t just a violation of our right to self-defense. It comes with a human cost; lives lost, families broken, needless heartbreak and grief because we’re looking for answers in the wrong direction. We have to deal with the people who are doing these things, not their weapon of choice, to bring crime to heel.

Colorado’s done a terrible job of that over the past decade, with lawmakers approving a number of new restrictions on legal gun owners while violent crime has steadily increased. Democrats have pursued a de-incarceration approach even as they’ve put more gun laws on the books. There’s also a “severe lack” of inpatient mental health beds for those in crisis, as well as a broader shortage of mental health workers at state-run facilities. In far too many cases, criminals aren’t getting the justice they deserve and those with mental health issues aren’t getting the help and treatment they need, but the anti-gun Democrats in the state legislature would rather do things like make it easier to sue gun makers for the actions of violent criminals or expand the state’s “red flag” law than seriously address the dire problems (of their own devising) in the criminal justice and mental health systems.

Filed Under: <![CDATA[Alexa Bartell]]>, <![CDATA[Colorado]]>, <![CDATA[Criminal Justice]]>, <![CDATA[Gun Control]]>, <![CDATA[homicide]]>, <![CDATA[Mental Health]]>, <![CDATA[rock throwing]]>, <![CDATA[Video]]>, Bearing Arms, News

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