Wednesday, March 12, 2014

John Lott on the NFL Decision to Ban Off-duty Cops from Carrying in Stadiums

“Banning off-duty law-enforcement officers from carrying seems completely crazy to me,” John Lott told Breitbart Sports. “We trust these law-enforcement officers when they are on-duty, but somehow we can’t trust them as soon as they are off-duty. Here these guys are willing to offer protection for free in case there is a terrorist attack and the NFL isn’t willing to let them do it.”
Lott, a onetime colleague of President Barack Obama’s at the University of Chicago, currently serves as president of the Crime Prevention Resource Center. An economist who has held positions at Yale, Stanford, Penn, and Rice, Lott has written extensively in the scholarly and popular press on multiple-victim public shootings.
“There are two ways of trying to prevent mass public shootings: 1) secure an area or 2) let victims defend themselves,” Lott posits. “It is basically impossible to completely secure an area. What you end up accomplishing is just ensuring that victims are defenseless. With unarmed victims, gun-free zones are a magnet for those who want to kill many people quickly.”
Now this will put our regular commenters into a quandary. They're gonna have to choose between supporting their hero John Lott and doing their usual cop-bashing.  Interestingly, Lott didn't say a word about denying civilian gun owners with carry permits permission to carry in the stadiums.

12 comments:

  1. No such conundrum for me. I have no particular reverence for Lott, and have consistently expressed my doubts about his assertion of a causal relationship between more guns and less crime. More importantly, I don't think such a relationship would even be relevant. Rather than quibble over statistics and what they mean, I ask what they have to do with my exercise of the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms. From Jeff Snyder's brilliant A Nation of Cowards:

    For the sake of discussion, let's assume that keeping and bearing arms suitable for self-defense is a bona fide individual right. If so, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder others with firearms, while one man alone uses a firearm to save a life, provides no basis for curbing the individual liberty to own and bear arms. Each individual must, because of his inherent, autonomous ethical freedom, be respected as an end in himself; no prior restraint may be imposed upon his right to own and bear firearms.

    Actually we can go further. Under an individual right view, the fact that 100,000 people a year murder innocents with firearms, and no one uses a firearm to protect himself or others provides no basis for a prior restraint. Individuals must still be possessed of a right to own firearms because their ethical freedom contains the potentiality of using firearms for good. That is, people can use this tool for good, if they turn to it with a good will.


    So, no, I have no problem disparaging Lott's advocacy of "special treatment" (if you've not yet copyrighted that term) for "Only Ones" (a position, by the way, a very long way off from "cop bashing").

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  2. I haven't seen a "cop bashing" pro-gun person ever suggest that off-duty cops shouldn't be allowed to carry. Have you, Mike?

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    1. Well, I don't know. You guys often lament the difference between cops' rights and civilian rights. That's pretty close.

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    2. The position that cops shouldn't have special rights denied the rest of us bears precisely zero resemblance to "cop bashing."

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    3. Uh huh, and the solution pointed out is that we should have those same rights- not that cops should be denied theirs. See what I'm saying?

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    4. Saying no special rights = cop bashing
      Telling people that they must turn in or sell guns or face potential legal repercussions is nothing like confiscation.
      Making a true statement and backing it up = lying.

      Ah, the destruction of meaning.

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    5. Keep denying it, guys. But, the outrage and indignation exhibited by some of you at the "only ones" derives from cop bashing, plain and simple.

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    6. You have such faith in your mind-reading skills--and that faith is so badly misplaced.

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  3. I haven't seen much "cop bashing" here, other than to say that the police ought to be held to the same standard as the rest of us.

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  4. The ban didn't work in Texas however. The Texas stadium is Texas property paid for by tax payer money. The off duty officers told the NFL to shove their ban as they carry into the stadium anyway.

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    1. "The off duty officers told the NFL to shove their ban as they carry into the stadium anyway."

      I'm having this vision of all of the Texas Rangers in the area making it a point to attend the first home game in Houston and silently daring some unarmed rent a cop to block his way into the game.
      Going to stay tuned for that video.

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  5. Lott's support for off-duty police carrying guns doesn't contradict his obvious and consistent support for ending gun free zones for everyone.

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