Crime Prevention and Research Center chief John Lott detailed in a post on his website the case of Virginia woman Deja Taylor, whose 6-year-old son shot and injured his teacher in January.
“Biden’s plea deal ‘lets him dodge possible charges on money laundering, bribery, trafficking’ and being an unregistered foreign agent,” Lott wrote. “Deja Taylor also had other issues. Her son used the gun to shoot a teacher, but Taylor wasn’t charged with a crime in that case.”
Taylor was charged earlier this year for being an unlawful user of a controlled substance in possession of a firearm and making a false statement during the purchase of a firearm.
The controlled substance in this case was marijuana, which is legal in Virginia but is a controlled substance under U.S. law and is still regulated by the federal government. Federal authorities said Taylor knew “she was an unlawful user” of marijuana when she purchased her firearm and denied using cannabis on documentation.
Taylor had no criminal history prior to the charges. She pleaded guilty this month and is awaiting her sentencing. The federal case against her could result in up to 25 years in prison, though her lawyers said sentencing guidelines call for 18 months to 24 months behind bars.
“Of cases involving false statements in buying a gun that are referred for prosecution, over 60% are prosecuted,” Lott, a gun and crime expert who previously worked for the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, told Fox News Digital.
“And the ones that aren’t prosecuted it is because of problems with the evidence. These cases are handled quickly in a few months, not almost five years. The evidence in the Hunter Biden case is rock solid. There is no question that he was a drug addict, that he was using illegal drugs.”
Lott also took issue with how U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss, who is handling the Biden case, is characterized as a “Trump appointee” by the media.
“The notion is that [Weiss] must be a Republican so that there is no political bias in how the Hunter Biden case was handled,” Lott said. “Yet, President Obama originally appointed him as the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware. Trump appointed Weiss as the U.S. attorney at the request of the two Democrat U.S. senators from Delaware.”
Emma Colton, “Americans guilty of charges similar to Hunter never got ‘sweetheart’ deal to keep them from prison: critics,” Fox News, June 25, 2023.
“At some point, when senators such as Schumer and Durbin are making ridiculously false statements about guns, you can’t even believe that they believe these claims. It is bad enough that they can’t acknowledge how these braces were designed to help disabled people hold on to a gun so that they could use it defensively, but for them to go and talk about these semi-automatic handguns as being machine guns, when they can’t even point to a single instance of this occurring, completely strains credulity,” said John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Paul Bedard, “Top Senate Democrats lied about pistol brace before vote: Experts,” Washington Examiner, June 23, 2023.
. . . In what appears to be a likely mass shooting unfolding, surveillance video captured a helmet-wearing gunman armed with an AR-15-type rifle shooting his way into the residential Turnberry Towers, but he didn’t make it beyond a second set of doors before an armed man inside the building opened fire.
The armed man inside, who is being hailed as a hero, is reportedly an employee of the towers and he dropped the potential mass shooter as he began to navigate the second set of doors.
Tom TIllison, “Watch: mass shooting averted in Vegas building by employee with handgun,” Business & Politics, June 27, 2023.
It is well documented by the CDC as well as the Crime Prevention Research Center that, at least two million times each year, lives are saved by responsibly armed citizens, and 200,000 times every year women prevent sexual assaults because they were responsibly armed.
Cheryl Todd, “The Second Amendment Is The Great Unifier,” Independent Woman’s Forum, July 20, 2023.
News moves fast. It wasn’t long ago when the whole “God save the Queen” speech was President Joe Biden’s latest gun control remarks. Then he started at them again, this time with a whole new flavor of stupid.
A lot of people have addressed Biden’s arguments, if you can even call them that, from the earlier speech, but few are in the same position to do so as John Lott.
Lott recently addressed the president’s incoherent ramblings comments. . . .
There’s a lot more there and you should go and read the whole thing, but these few paragraphs are what I’d like to expound on.
First, Lott is absolutely correct in the discussion of how powerful these AR pistols are. The truth is that .223 and 5.56 are not overly powerful rifle rounds in the first place. In fact, neither is legal for hunting deer in many states, and not because it’ll blow a lung out or anything. It’s because it lacks the power to harvest the deer humanely.
Most hunting rifles–the very guns we’re assured no one wants to take away, including by Biden–are far more powerful. If the problem with pistol braces is that they magically make the gun more powerful, then gun control advocates are going to have to address them sooner or later, thus making the claims the guns will be left alone a lie.
And he’s right that a shorter barrel actually reduces the power of these weapons. Sure, with a shotgun, a shorter barrel increases the spread of the shot–not as much as many people think, but it does increase it some–but with a rifle, all it does is prevent the round from reaching its full potential.
So, honestly, all this kvetching over short-barrel rifles is beyond silly. If anything, you’d think they’d want to focus on longer-barrel rifles, but that would require understanding firearms and that’s never going to happen.
Finally, on the subject of mass shootings.
Honestly, that last quoted paragraph needs to be engraved in brass and mounted in every politician’s office, every newsroom, and really anywhere else people want to pontificate on guns.
Over and over again, we’ve been assured that the AR-15 is the preferred weapon for mass shooters. People such as Biden making the claim forget all the lives claimed with handguns in mass shootings–plenty of them, in fact–and focus on the so-called assault weapons.
The problem is and has always been the people pulling the trigger, not what kind of weapon that trigger belongs to.
This has already run on long enough, but the truth is that Biden just got taken to the proverbial woodshed.
Tom Knighton, “John Lott dismantles Biden’s gun control remarks,” Bearing Arms, June 22, 2023
Of all the emotion-driven arguments spouted by anti-gun activists, perhaps none is more common than the claim that firearms are the number one cause of death for kids in this country, surpassing traffic fatalities as of 2020. Of course, even back when the stats from the gun control crowd indicated that traffic fatalities were the leading cause of death for kids, you didn’t hear much talk about banning “high powered” sports cars or smart phones that lead to distracted driving like we do with their calls for bans on so-called assault weapons and “large capacity” magazines. The prohibitionary stance of the anti-gunners is limited almost exclusively to guns themselves.
But are those figures even correct? Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center says the answer is no. . . .
While the gun control lobby has a vested interest in lumping together gun-involved homicides, suicides, and accidental/negligent deaths, these are all very distinct issues that deserve distinct policy decisions that will address the actual problem. As Lott notes, gun bans might reduce firearm-involved suicides, but if the overall suicide rate increases how could anyone call that a win? The goal shouldn’t be to get people to take their lives by other means, but to find a way through the darkness; ideally not just surviving but thriving.
The same is true when it comes to gun-involved homicides. For gun control activists, the answer is always fewer guns, starting with lawful gun owners. The reality is that a preponderance of violent crimes are committed by individuals well known to law enforcement who are illegally in possession of a firearm, like the suspect in Washington, D.C. accused of shooting and killing a 25-year-old high school teacher from Kentucky, who has multiple convictions in the District for crimes like a violent burglary and illegal gun possession, but who received probation after each and every conviction or guilty plea.
As Lott notes, “gun control advocates will tell you that Washington and Chicago weren’t fair tests. They will point out that criminals could still get guns in Virginia or Maryland, or in Illinois or Indiana. While that might explain why murder rates didn’t fall as promised, it doesn’t explain why murder and violent crime rates went up.”
It also doesn’t explain why Virginia has a much lower crime rate than more gun control-friendly locales like D.C. or Maryland, which shouldn’t be the case if the anti-gunners are right that more guns equals more crime.
Lott concludes that “Democrats can’t accept their responsibility for increased violent crime in 2020 and 2021,” and instead continue claiming that guns are the leading cause of death for kids because they want to blame firearms, gun owners, the Second Amendment, and those politicians who dare to defend the right to keep and bear arms. This deflection isn’t anything new, unfortunately, and sadly it gets in the way of enacting proven strategies to bring down crime rates without impacting anyone’s Second Amendment rights. Even when the left finally concedes that crimes should come with consequences, as we saw in Washington, D.C. this week, they’re still doing everything in their power to prevent lawful gun ownership and the right to armed self-defense. The statistics may change, but they remain wedded to their anti-gun agenda all the same.
Cam Edwards, “Lott: Guns are NOT the leading cause of death among kids,” Bearing Arms, July 15, 2023.
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