Blame Bush. It has been almost three years since President Obama took office, yet he still blames Bush for the bad economy. Now the Obama administration is following the same strategy to get out of the “Fast and Furious” mess.

“Fast and Furious,” also called the “Gunwalker” case, involves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) agents ordering American gun dealers to sell guns to obvious Mexican drug gang members during 2009 and 2010. This was done over the objections of the gun dealers.

Both Fox News and the Washington Post started covering this scandal in early February this year. It may be excusable that Attorney General Eric Holder did not read the press reports, but, if we are to believe his congressional testimony Tuesday, he and his staff also neglected to pay attention to the 100 or so page “weekly reports” summarizing activity in the Justice Department.

Those reports began mentioning the operation as long ago as July 2010. When Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May this year he claimed: “I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Holder reiterated again Tuesday that he simply didn’t have the time to read even the summaries. Neither did his staff.

Holder had few options Tuesday.

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Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s and Washington, D.C.’s gun control laws. Politicians predicted disaster. “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision. Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets.” The New York Times even editorialized last month about the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”

But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in D.C., murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated; they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate, but the national media has been completely silent. One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen.

In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year– back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982. Meanwhile, the other four most populous cities saw a total drop at the same time of only 6 percent.

Similarly, in the year after the 2008 Heller decision, the murder rate fell 2.5 times faster in D.C. than in the rest of the country. It also fell more than three times as fast as in other cities that are close to D.C.’s size. (more…)

Academic debates occasionally get pretty ugly, and that is just the way it is. Sometimes they get really very ugly. There is one case that has bothered me for several years.

James Q. Wilson is now 80 years old, and for decades he has been the most prominent criminologist in the country, responsible for a number of important ideas, such as the Broken Windows theory, which argues that urban disorder and vandalism produce additional crime.

Undoubtedly, Wilson has made a number of enemies as he has taken positions that upset some on the left. One such issue was Wilson’s involvement with the National Academy of Sciences panel on Firearms and Violence. The panel was set up by the Clinton Administration and contained many outspoken gun control proponents (e.g., Steve Levitt argued that theoretically the presence of firearms leads to greater levels of violence and Richard Rosenfeld argued that those opposed to the Brady Law were “immune to scientific assessment”); nevertheless the final report refused to take a stand on whether right-to-carry laws reduce crime.

Dissents for National Academy of Sciences reports are very rare. Being on a panel is a cushy, prestigious position, and there is a lot of pressure to sign on to any conclusion. Those who don’t aren’t invited back to be on future panels. Over the ten years prior to the Firearms and Violence report, there were only two dissents out of the previous 236 reports. Wilson himself had been on four of these panels and never previously wanted to write a dissent, including the previous panel that attacked work showing that the death penalty deters crime.

But for Wilson, the firearms panel was different. Wilson’s dissent was not only rare, he was also forceful: “In view of the confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate, it is hard for me to understand why these claims are called ‘fragile.’”

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If Congress and the president don’t raise the debt ceiling, the consequences will be disastrous, politicians and pundits tell us, — the equivalent of an economic Armageddon. And President Obama warns that the consequences are so dire that he cannot possibly tolerate any delay in making an agreement. He announced yesterday that any debt deal must be completed by July 15th.

According to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, failure to raise the limit will cause the US to default and “cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.” On Thursday, he renewed these warnings. And President Obama alarmed retired Americans this week: “I cannot guarantee that those [Social Security] checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

But the list of terrible things to come, if the government is stopped from continued deficit spending, goes on. Failure to raise the ceiling, it is warned, will dramatically raise mortgage interest rates, cause housing sales to plunge, create panic on world financial markets, and destroy the value of the dollar.

Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s head of his Counsel of Economic Advisers, went so far this week as to blame the continued slow economic recovery on those few politicians who are against raising the debt ceiling. “[I]t’s important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don’t know that the government — there are people actively advocating that the government declare it’s not going to pay its bills,” he told MSNBC. Yet, the slow recovery has been going on for over two years, well before Republicans obtained control of the House of Representatives.

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The police described it as an armed robbery and a hostage situation. Before dawn on Sunday, May, 8th, two robbers stormed into a Walgreens store wearing masks and gloves and carrying guns. Video cameras in the store on Napier Avenue in Benton Township, Michigan captured the whole event. Fortunately, though, Jeremy Hoven, a pharmacist and one of the employees in the store, had a permitted concealed handgun with him. Unfortunately, Walgreens fired Hoven for having a gun at work.

Police Lt. Delmar Lange thought that Hoven had done the right thing firing shots and forcing the robbers to flee. “[Hoven] could see the hostage situation developing. He could not retreat any farther. He was in the back room. If it was me, I would have done the same thing,” Lange told the Detroit Free-Press. Lange thought that the video cameras clearly showed that Hoven had no alternative. The robbers were “very aggressive and very dangerous in what they did and how they did it.”

At least one of the three other workers in the store was also convinced that Hoven did the right thing, sending Hoven a thank-you card with a photograph of his four children.

Other evidence also suggests that Hoven did “the right thing.” The National Crime Victimization Survey shows that defending oneself with a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a robber. For example, people who protect themselves with a gun are injured in robberies about 8 percent of the time, but those who behave passively are injured by the criminals 24 percent of the time, a three times higher rate.

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Carrying a gun protects people from criminals, but carrying an audio recorder can also pretty important. The Phildelphia Daily News yesterday showed just how valuable a tape recorder can be. Some police in Philadelphia apparently didn’t know what Pennsylvania and Philadelphia laws are on law-abiding citizens carrying handguns. Given that there are about 800,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Pennsylvania, there could be a lot of misunderstandings.

Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but even they can make mistakes. Hopefully because this incident was taped there will be a few less mistakes in how Philadelphia police treat permit holders in the future.

On a mild February afternoon, Fiorino, 25, decided to walk to an AutoZone on Frankford Avenue in Northeast Philly with the .40-caliber Glock he legally owns holstered in plain view on his left hip. His stroll ended when someone called out from behind: “Yo, Junior, what are you doing?”
Fiorino wheeled and saw Sgt. Michael Dougherty aiming a handgun at him.
What happened next would be hard to believe, except that Fiorino audio-recorded all of it: a tense, profanity-laced, 40-minute encounter with cops who told him that what he was doing – openly carrying a gun on the city’s streets – was against the law.
“Do you know you can’t openly carry here in Philadelphia?” Dougherty asked, according to the YouTube clip.
“Yes, you can, if you have a license to carry firearms,” Fiorino said. “It’s Directive 137. It’s your own internal directive.”

Unfortunately, referencing the actual law correctly didn’t have the desired effect on the police.

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Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals, but gun control advocates, such as Media Matters, don’t want to acknowledge that there are costs to disarming law-abiding citizens. Lately Media Matters has particularly been incensed that anyone would point out that the vast majority of denials from Brady Act background checks involve so-called “false positives” — law-abiding citizens incorrectly being identified as banned individuals.

Media Matters claims that all those stopped by the background checks from buying guns are prohibited individuals, that no mistakes are made by the government. And Media Matters is willing to engage in any amount of name calling and fraudulent photos to attack those who question their claims.

There are several things to understand about how the Brady Law background check process works. At gun stores or other registered dealers, would-be buyers have to fill out a form asking whether there are any criminal convictions or types of mental illness that would prevent them from legally purchasing the weapon. Falsely answering these questions amounts to perjury. If someone answers the question by saying that they have a background that prohibits them from buying, a gun dealers stop right there and do not even process those forms. And if someone is believed to have knowingly provided false information on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) form and prosecutors believe that they can prove that knowingly false information was provided, the would-be buyer faces prosecution.

Yet, the NICS system accidentally flags many law-abiding people, stopping those who simply have the same name as a prohibited individual from buying a gun.

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The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne seems to actually believe the Obama administration’s claim that he has helped gun rights (see here). Yet, it almost seems as if many on the left attack Obama simply to make him appear more moderate than he actually is. What set Dionne off was President Obama’s claim this past Sunday in an op-ed: “My administration has not curtailed the rights of gun owners, it has expanded them, including allowing people to carry their guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.” In fact, Obama allowed the change in regarding the guns in national parks, not because he supported the idea, but because it was a very popular amendment to a bill that he wanted, the “Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009.”

The Obama administration has been a consistent opponent of gun ownership. It has enacted a ban on the importation of semiautomatic guns because: “The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents.” They have also tried imposing much more extensive reporting requirements on sales of long guns. However, possibly the biggest threat is Obama’s nomination of Andrew Traver to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. There is also the Obama administration’s push for the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty and its continual inaccurate statements about the source of Mexico’s crime guns. In addition, President Obama’s appointments to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are adamantly against any protection for individual ownership of guns. If one of the five justices in the majority of the Heller or McDonald cases were to die or retire, not only would further gains be prevented, but even those two precedents would be threatened.

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Tom Brokaw said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on January 13:

“Gun control is too simple a phrase to define all the complications and nuances of it, frankly. In Arizona they have a wide open system. I would be nervous about going into a bar or restaurant in Arizona on a Saturday night where people can carry concealed without permits.”

Well, if he is really concerned about guns in bars, poor Mr. Brokaw is not going to be able to frequent bars in very many states. Arizona does allow guns in bars, though, despite his claims to the contrary, actually require a concealed handgun permit to go into an establishment that serves alcohol. The following figure is from Opencarry.org (more details are available at their website).

On a more serious note, despite the fact that permit holders are allowed to go into bars in Arizona and other states, there is no evidence that they pose a risk to anyone. As of December 1, 2007 in Arizona, there were 99,370 active permits. During 2007, 33 permits were revoked for any reason — a 0.03% rate — cases that did not involve using the gun to harm others.

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People walking the streets armed with guns must be dangerous, right? The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center keep claiming that even those individuals who have legally obtained permits to carry concealed handguns are extremely dangerous. With millions of Americans already having been issued such permits from the various states, this is an important issue.

The gun control organizations have frequently made these claims in the press. The Associated Press articles by Erik Schelzig and by Jim Abrams have given extensive, uncritical coverage. Members of the gun control organizations have made these claims unchallenged on such places as Fox News and on the Huffington Post. But the gun control advocates inaccurately describe many shooting cases, choosing to ignore that the majority of incidents involve people properly defending themselves.

Over the past three years, the number of active permit holders in the United States has gone from about 5 million to more than 6.2 million today. The numbers issued by the state regulatory agencies show time after time that these permit holders abide by the law.

Take Florida, which currently has the most concealed handgun permit holders in the country and is one of the two most populous states with right-to-carry laws. Between Oct. 1, 1987, and May 31 this year, permits had been issued to 1.8 million people. On average, the permits had been held for quite a long time, well over 10 years. For all those individuals across the more than 22 years of legal carry, there were only 167 cases where the permit was revoked for a firearms related violation, or about 0.01 percent of permit holders. While the state doesn’t provide a precise breakdown of the reason for those revocations, the vast majority were apparently for people who accidentally carried their concealed handgun into a gun-free zone, such as an airport or school.

Throughout the past 30 months, beginning January 2008, only three additional permit holders have had their permit revoked for a firearms-related violation. With more than 739,000 active permit holders, that is an annual revocation rate of 0.00017 percent.

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President Obama surely didn’t intend it, but he deserves some credit for last year’s 7.4 percent drop in murder rates. His election caused gun sales to soar, and crime rates to plummet.

While gun sales started notably rising in October 2008, sales really soared immediately after Mr. Obama won the presidential race. 450,000 more people bought guns in November 2008 than bought them in November 2007, that’s over a 40 percent increase in sales. By comparison, the change from November 2006 to November 2007 was only about 35,000. Over the last decade, the average year-to-year increase in monthly sales was only 21,000.

The increase in sales continued well beyond November 2008. From November 2008 to October 2009, almost 2.5 million more people bought guns in the 12 months after the election than in the preceding 12 months. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, doesn’t tell us how many guns each person bought just the number of people who bought them. Most likely though, gun sales rose by more than the number of people who purchased them.

At the same time gun sales were soaring, there was an unusually large drop in murder rates. The 7.4 percent drop in the murder rate was the largest drop in murder rates since the 1999. For those who don’t remember, 1999, when President Bill Clinton and Columbine occurred, was another time when gun sales soared. With people such as Elena Kagan serving as Mr. Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser were pushing hard for more gun control, Americans were worried that more gun bans were coming. And in response gun sales soared.

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Gun owners might not feel besieged right now, but they should be very concerned. Last week the Obama administration announced its support for the UN Small Arms Treaty. This treaty poses real risks for freedom and safety in the United States as well as the rest of the world.

According to the U.N., guns used in armed conflicts cause 300,000 deaths worldwide every year. Their proposed solution is a simple one. Keep rebels from getting guns by requiring that countries “prevent, combat and eradicate” what those countries define as “the illicit trade in small arms.”

The UN’s solution isn’t too surprising when one looks at the long list of notorious totalitarian regimes, such as Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone, which support these “reforms.” But not all insurgencies are “bad.” To ban providing guns to rebels in totalitarian countries is like arguing that there is never anything such as a just war.

In hindsight, during World War II, should the French or Norwegian resistance movements simply have given up? Surely this would have minimized causalities. But that is hardly a one-time event. What about Afghanis in their fight against the Soviet Union or Nicaraguan rebels fighting communist dictators during the 1980s? Was it wrong to help out? What about totalitarian governments that massacre their citizens? Don’t they have a right to protect themselves?

Many countries already ban private gun ownership. Rwanda and Sierra Leone are two notable examples. Yet, with more than a million people hacked to death over the last decade-and-a-half, were their citizens better off without guns?

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The District of Columbia’s murder rate plummeted by an astounding 25 percent last year, much faster than for the US as a whole or for similarly sized cities. If you had asked Chicago’s Mayor Daley, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to strike down DC’s handgun ban and gunlock requirements should have lead to a surge in murders, with Wild West shootouts. The Supreme Court might keep Daley’s predictions in mind today as they hear the oral arguments on Tuesday in the Chicago handgun ban case.

Everyone in DC now knows that murder rates rose after the handgun ban and fell after they were removed. Unfortunately, Chicago never learned that lesson. The forthcoming third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows that in the 17 years after its ban on new handguns went into effect, there are only two years where Chicago’s murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. Chicago’s murder rate fell relative to other largest 50 largest cities prior to the ban and rose relative to them afterwards. For example, Chicago’s murder rate went from equalling the average for those other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992 and by 68 percent in 2002. There is no year after the ban that Chicago’s murder rate fared as well relative to other cities as it did in 1982.

Similar comparisons exist for the top ten largest cities, the US as a whole, or the counties that boarder Chicago. The accompanying figure shows how Chicago’s murder rates changed relative to the rates in the adjacent counties. In the five years before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate fell by 28 percent relative to those counties. (County level crime data only goes back to 1977.) in the five years after the ban, Chicago’s murder rate doubled relative to those other counties.

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The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

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