So were Piers Morgan and Christiane Amanpour dishonest about crime rates last night?
CNN has made quite a habit of outrageous statements on gun issues. You can see previous interviews here, here, here, here, and here. From my appearance last night on CNN.
MORGAN: . . . How do you justify the claim more guns makes more safe people in America? I don't -- don't get it.
LOTT: Every place that guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up. You cannot point to one place, whether it's Chicago or whether it's D.C. or whether it's been England of whether it's been Jamaica or Ireland.
MORGAN: I'm sorry, but that's just a complete lie. It's a complete lie. The gun murder rate in Britain is 35 a year, average. You need to stop repeating a blatant lie, about what happens in other countries. [cross talk] No, you're not going to get away with this. You lied about it the other day. Thirty-five gun murders a year in Britain, eleven to twelve thousand in America. Stop lying, because what you say drives Americans to defend themselves.
After Morgan then claimed multiple times that I had lied, the video then shows that I tried to explain that there is a difference between levels and changes. In an obvious setup, Christiane Amanpour claimed that the murder rate in the UK had initially been flat after the ban and then fell.
Amanpour: After Dunblane, they put in these bans, they put in these punishments, fines, jail sentences, etc. and its true that straight afterwards there wasn't a huge change, but 2002/2003 until 2011 the rate plummeted by 44%.
Morgan and Amanpour were clearly taking about the number of homicides so initially here is a chart for that (source here see Table 1.01 and the column marked "Number of offences currently recorded as homicide"). She is right that there were substantial increases in law enforcement activity (for the original data see here and here), which one suspects should have been associated with reduced crime rates, but, even with that, how can she make the claims that she did about homicides? (Note that it often takes a couple of years after a person becomes a police officer before they become very effective.)
Two clear points can be seen from the next two figures. First, after the ban, clearly homicide rates bounce around over time, but there is not one single year during the 15 years after the ban where the number of homicides is lower than it was immediately prior to the ban in 1996. By the way, the average yearly homicides from 1990 to 1996 was 601. For the time period after the ban started it was 707, an 18 percent increase. Second, the number of homicides remained higher than the immediate pre-ban rate despite a large increase in the number of police officers during 2003 and 2004.
CONTINUE . . .
In Debate with Breitbart's Shapiro, CNN's Piers Morgan Calls the Constitution 'Your Little Book'
“You come in here, brandish your little book as if I don’t know what’s in there--”
“My little book? That’s the Constitution of the United States. It’s our founding document, Piers.”
“I know what’s in your Constitution.”
“Do you really?”
That was the climax of a heated debate between Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro and CNN’s Piers Morgan on live television this evening--one in which Morgan came off much the worse for wear. Shapiro began by pointing out that for weeks, Morgan had bullied guests who defend the right to bear arms by "standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook."
“How dare you,” said a rattled Morgan.
“I have seen you do it repeatedly,” Shapiro replied.
< snip >
Morgan then presented Shapiro with a letter co-signed by Ronald Reagan in 1994, urging support for the assault weapons ban (an ineffective policy, which lapsed after ten years). He challenged Shapiro to justify “why an American needs an assault weapon.”
Shapiro repeated his point on tyranny, to which Morgan said: “Do you know how absurd you sound?”
In so doing, he proved Shapiro’s point:
Here’s where you go into the bullying....For weeks now, you have been saying that anybody who disagrees with your position is absurd, idiotic, and doesn’t care about the dead kids in Sandy Hook. And then when I say that’s a bullying tactic, you turn around and say that I’m bullying you.
Watch The Video
