“You have to do a lot of work intellectually to win people over.”
Following the awards lunch at the Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC) on Sept. 27, Prof. John Lott, author of More Guns = Less Crime, Straight Shooting and The Bias Against Guns, detailed the importance of seeking out data on firearms in order to influence both scholarly and public opinion.
Explaining that “things we don’t know” are important, Lott said courts will be taking up more cases on gun rights and gun law challenges, and those courts will require data to make proper rulings. He said this information is important so that pro-gun litigants can make “the intellectual case.”
Citing the split decision in the Supreme Court’s sharply divided Heller ruling, Lott noted that the four dissenting justices had argued that even if the Second Amendment protected an individual right, “they believed the empirical evidence was such that they would still justify saying that the DC gun ban was constitutional.”
Lott said courts today do not issue absolute rulings on any subject, and that all decisions face “balancing tests.” In terms of the Second Amendment, he asked rhetorically what the balancing test is going to be, whether it is strict scrutiny, the same level of scrutiny that applies to other civil rights, or some lower standard of scrutiny.
“You have to do a lot of work intellectually to win people over,” Lott insisted. “Don’t take for granted how the courts will rule.”
One subject the courts have not yet considered is fees. Lott noted that firearms licensing and registration all have fees attached, unlike newspapers, which are protected by the First Amendment.
“If you were to go and have a tax on newspapers,” Lott observed, “it seems pretty clear that the Supreme Court would strike that down as unconstitutional…because of the First Amendment. Yet we have lots and lots of fees for people to go and have guns. If DC charges you $1,000 to register your guns, the court would clearly say that that’s unconstitutional.”
However, he noted, what if the fee is only $10, $20 or $50. Such fees, Lott suggested, may not be considered prohibitive, and he guessed that “in those cases the court’s at least going to hear empirical evidence on that.”
And even Lott commented about the upcoming presidential election, recalling how he had once met Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, when both were doing lectures. Obama is an attorney and Lott is an economist.
“He didn’t seem to like to talk to people he disagreed with,” Lott recalled. “I went over and introduced myself and he said, ‘Oh, you’re the gun guy’ and he...turned to me and said ‘I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.’ ”
At that point, Lott continued, he suggested that he and Obama might discuss the issue over dinner.
“He kind of smirked and walked away,” Lott said.
That encounter was years ago, he acknowledged.
“People can change over a decade,” Lott added. “I have a hard time believing he can change as much as the media has painted him. At least on the issue of guns, at least my experience with him at the time is that he was well to the left of the vast majority of academics, which is an interesting accomplishment to be able to achieve.”