by Dave Workman
Senior Editor

Lott Logic
John Lott, author of More Guns=Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, offered scathing observations about how the rhetoric of anti-gunners frequently collides head on with fact. Pointing to citizen use of firearms following disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Lott noted that in both situations, it was often citizens with guns who kept order amid chaos.

Armed merchants in Los Angeles banded together to protect their property from being destroyed or looted, he noted.

“The notion of wishing to have guns in disasters is nothing new,” he said.

Lott recalled autumn of 2004 when anti-gunners were railing about the sunset of the ban on so-called assault weapons, and about their predictions of “blood running in the streets.” He quickly went to work demolishing those forecasts with fact.

“They say the gun debate issue is so emotional that facts just don’t matter and I think that’s wrong,” he said.

So much data, Lott observed, is lost in what amounts to an ocean of statistics and facts, so it is up to gunowners to focus on certain facts so they are prominent.

“One of the nice things about the gun control movement is that they are not very bashful for making very extreme statements about things,” Lott said. “The things they say, the predictions they make. . . . Hopefully, you can hold people responsible for the type of predictions they make."

He said that one year after the ban ended, it has become “pretty obvious” to everyone that violent crime and murder rates didn’t go up, but actually declined in most places.

Noting that the ban was “the cornerstone of the American gun control movement,” Lott said the shrill predictions from people like Sarah Brady and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) were steeped in “extreme emotion.” He also said that there have now been a number of academic studies about the effects of the Brady Law, and none of them shows any discernible proof that the law is responsible for crime reduction.

He noted that last year, murders declined by about 3.6%, although the murder rate declined less in states that have adopted their own semi-auto bans than in states without such laws.

“In three of states with bans you actually saw number of murders rise,” he said.

Reaching Out
Following Lott’s address, a panel discussion on Reaching Out to Other Constituents convened, with authors Songer, Paxton Quigley and Debbie Ferns joining Randall Herrst, president of the Center for the Study of Crime.

Quigley, author of Armed and Female and Stayin’ Alive, said not enough women are involved in the gun rights battle.

“According to the Department of Justice, 27% of American women keep a gun in the house and 37.6 million females either own or have rapid access to guns,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not enough.”

She contended that changes in gun laws and policies will only come when more women get directly involved in the gun rights movement. The same goes for recruiting new shooters from the next generation.

Ferns, author of Babes with Bullets, revealed that she had never handled a firearm until she was 46 years old. She said it had never occurred to her that gun and hunting rights “would ever be in trouble in this country.”

She also questioned where the “multitude” of young shooters and hunters were.

Ferns took the women’s sports editor for The Arizona Sun in Phoenix on a shooting jaunt and was then offered an opportunity to write a regular column on women’s shooting sports. She said it is important to invite women shooting because “very few women I know will crash a party.”

She became an instructor, processed more than 200 “moms and kids” through the firearms course in a year, and became a gun rights activist in Arizona.

Herrst told the audience that he reaches out with a somewhat different strategy.

“At every public speaking appearance I make,” he said, “I bring this up. Gun control increases violent crime by shifting the balance of power to favor criminals while it disarms helpless victims.”

He said activists need to understand that when they speak to an audience, they must address the self-interests of the audience, and not themselves. They must also learn how to overcome emotions with facts, and how to deal with arguments on the emotional level. He also said they must learn to deal effectively with the media.

Rounding out the panel, Songer acknowledged coming from a non-gun-owning family in New York. But then, “I had my brain washed, and here I am,” she joked.

Her husband was in law enforcement, and she accompanied him to firearms training “camps.” Now her family has had to acknowledge that “not all people who own guns are gun nuts.”

Songer suggested inviting a non-shooting friend or neighbor to a gun range. She also suggested the same thing with reporters, to get them familiar with firearms.

Finally, she implored gun organizations to put some money into television programming, and not just lobbying efforts.

Bill of Gun Rights
The next panel brought together attorneys David Caplan, a constitutional scholar who is a member of the NRA board of directors, and Michael Sabbeth, an activist lawyer from Colorado, with noted firearms author and instructor Massad Ayoob.

They explained how gun rights are protected throughout the Bill of Rights, and not just the Second Amendment.

Caplan noted that the concept of the home as castle comes from the Fourth Amendment, and that if someone comes into your home to rob you, there are precedents that allow the use of deadly force against such an invasion. He also said citizens have a right to use deadly force against would-be arsonists.

Sabbeth, a Denver attorney and author, observed that “I came to the conclusion that all of this gun rights stuff is not about the gun.” He sees the gun issue in another way, which is that the underlying ideology of the left is Nihilism.

He cautioned the audience that the government is becoming more paternalistic, and this was underscored by what happened in New Orleans following the hurricane. The government there decided to start seizing guns, he said, even though “there was absolutely no evidence that any legitimate gunowner was causing a problem.”

Gunowners, he suggested, should not tolerate assaults on their rights.

“Tolerance, at best,” he said, “is amoral and at worst it is immoral. It leads to indifference. Indifference leads to aiding and abetting, and aiding and abetting leads to fascism."

He suggested that gunowners “must take control of the rhetoric.”

Ayoob’s turn at the microphone provided the audience with a different perspective on the New Orleans disaster. He noted that some of the city’s police officers could not get to work because the floods left them stranded. Most, he said, had lost their own homes, and did have problems with crime and natural predators, including snakes and alligators. He even reported some shark sightings in the flooded area.

However, Ayoob also noted that “No order was given that I know of that suspended the Constitution.”

There were reports of police fighting with criminals in waist-deep water, and of other officers who ran out of ammunition. Other reports noted how armed citizens defended themselves against looters. His descriptions, based on news accounts, reflected a state of anarchy in which citizens were essentially on their own.

“What has happened in this nation the past few weeks,” he said, “has validated everything you all have worked for.”