Here's a qustion.

Have you read any gun research recently?

If you had, you'll note Lott's research is pretty much always the very first thing mentioned in the literature review.

The can't provide raw data complaint, is the only thing you mentioned that was a true complaint against him... yet you conviently left out the fact that that's a complaint with basically every professor at his school because they all lost their data after a hardware crash.

Hell the biggest counterpoint to him has been Levitt.  Who actually is against gun control now, suggests RTC pretty much has no effect on anything, gun control doesn't have any effect on anything and suggesting it also doesn't work.  Instead he suggests mandatory enhancements for crimes committed with guns.

Academic reality can, and often does, vary from random stuff you might find on internet article comment sections or silly biased websites.

Additionally, Lott's research isn't really wrong or weird. It just defines mass shootings slightly differently then the FBI's way of doing it to make it more scientifically useful.

The usual classification is any shooting that kills four or more people. Which isn't really a useful classification because if you'll note the report Torillian posted you see a lot of "Mass shootings" are "family annihilator" murder suicides and shootings resulting in people fleeing the police.

Not really similar to the type of people who plan to go into a public place and just start shooting random people until they are stopped or killed.


Additionally, you'll note they don't consider Navy yards and such gun free zones. Even though they are, because you can't actually posses guns inside the navy yards or other military bases.

Soldiers with guns patrol the outsides, but that's like argueing a school isn't a gun free zone because the police patrol by it.

It's not really done in a weird way.  So much as in the way of somebody who would run an expierment to see something would phrase things.   

The question being "Are people who mass shoot aquantinces/strangers in a murder/suicide type situation more likely to pick places in which guns are not expected."

But the navy Yard doesn't fit that description at all.  You can't just discount the armed guards there, so you can't say "oh he picked that place because he knew to expect less resistance, because in fact he was in a shoot out with armed guards before police arrived.  You can say that he wouldn't expect to see random civilians with weapons, but you can't say that he'd be less likely to come across someone with a gun because that's exactly what armed guards are.  

And no, you can't say that it's the same as a school because the police don't have checkpoints throughtout a school with weapons ready.  If you had a school that had as many armed guards as the Navy Yard then yes I think it would be disingenuous to call such a place a "gun free zone".  It's an "armed civilian" free zone but it is certainly not a gun free zone.  

Why is allowing teachers to carry firearms "ridiculous?" So we can use firearms protect our money, our government officials our planes and buildings or even our national parks with guns but not out children? Heck, if we can't trust our teachers to carry a firearm why would we trust them to even be near our children?

If a locality wants to allow teachers the ability to carry a concealed firearm, I for one am all for it.

In 2002 -- five years after enacting its gun ban -- the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime.  In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.

Even Australia's Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:

• In 2006, assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
• Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
• Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.

Moreover, Australia and the United States -- where no gun-ban exists -- both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:

• Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America's rate dropped 31.7 percent.
• During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
• Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
• Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
• At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.
• Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.

This IS the country you do live in right?

There arent' any armed guards inside the navy yard though.   Just on the outside of the navy yard. 

That's why it took forever for those armed guards to respond after he got in with the fake ID.

Or, armed guard I should say.  Since I beleive a total of one guard responded before the police did.  Which is exactly how many police officers your average US Highschool tends to have.

Otherwise, why wouldn't he of just shot the guards at the gate?  Instead of smuggling the gun in unassembled then putting it together within the gun free zone.

I can see not counting it in the study because it seems possibly poltiical in motivation for shooting up a naval yard, but that's about it.

Would you trust your boss to carry around a gun while at work? I wouldn't, not unless I can carry around my own gun as well. What gives special rights to teachers to carry around guns and not the children attending the school, or should we allow teachers easily abusable power and turn the school system into even more of a jail system? The line has to be drawn somewhere and that line is educators should have no business with firearms on the job.

Duh. They want people to follow orders and enforce laws.

Actually the real reason... that was upheld in court, was that being a police officer was boring as fuck and therefore someone with a genius level intellect would get bored... and it's expensive to make a police officer.

Again, I recommend looking into John Lott a little closer. I have seen enough here to know that I am engaged with a nitpicker who'll keep coming back until the end of time with new tidbits of knowledge freshly harvested from the internet and present it as common knowledge that you've done extensive research about. I have no interest in stroking your ego so you can pretend that you know this soooo much better than anyone else. So far you've displayed a lack of understanding of the critisism against Lott, misrepresented the 'facts' around those critisisms, completely missed the stance of his critics and dismissed several of the issues people have with his research.

I know what you will be coming back with here, so I will direct this to other people who might read this reply and have an actual interest in finding out something about this issue rather than a pathological need to be right and have the last word: Do yourselfs a favor and look into the many questionmarks that are associated with John Lott's integrity as a reasearcher and what his agenda could possibly be. Then keep in mind that with the highly polarized gun debate that any critisism against Lott will also most likely carry a certain level of bias itself. Then, armed with that knowledge look at the lists and research quoted from John Lott and decide for yourself if you should take his findings at face value, or if it's better to double check his claims for yourself. My personal preference is to always double check claims that seem to be overwhelmingly obvious, and that strategy has served me well so far, but as always; to each his own.