young.qxd
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The standard propaganda of the National Rifle Association, repeated almost verbatim by Field, is that everyone needs a gun. If you’re a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, then you need a gun to protect yourself from the criminals that the gun manufacturers and dealers have done such a fine job of arming (without any assumed liability). With this kind of logic the fire department might as well hire a contract arsonist and then charge people to put out the fires that the arsonist started.
But there are a lot of doubts hovering about the Lott study. He never submitted it to his academic peers for review, as is customary. He just handed it over to the NRA for their own promotional purposes. It embarrassed faculty at the U of C not only for its barbaric conclusion, but also for its sloppy research and questionable objectivity. Lott is a member of the Olin Foundation, which is funded by the Olin family, which owns–surprise!!– the company that manufactures Winchester rifles. The Lott study is truly most useful in the smallest room of your house. In numerous credible and objective (not funded by arms manufacturers) studies conducted in this country and others, every single conclusion comes out the same: when the number of firearms is increased in a society, the number of firearm fatalities (homicides, suicides, and accidents) increases on a predictable curve.
