So were Piers Morgan and Christiane Amanpour dishonest about crime rates last night?

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johnrlott.blogspot.com ^ | 20 December, 2012 | John Lott


From my appearance last night on CNN.

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%.

Amanpour was clearly taking about the number of homicides so 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, 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?


(Excerpt)
Read more at:
John Lott's Website: So were Piers Morgan and Christiane Amanpour dishonest about crime rates last night?


Gun Crime - Politics.co.uk
Despite these strong sentiments, the UK has not averted gun crime by any means
... The Firearms Amendment of 1997 completely banned handguns for private
ownership. Fourteen years after Dunblane, the mass killings in Cumbria carried
out by ... saw a 40 per cent increase in the number of gun crime incidents in the
UK.
Gun Crime - 61k - Cached
 
Two issues are at play: First, people who grow up with a sense of societal unfairness (usually from modest family backgrounds) are drawn towards journalism as a way to "reform" that society. Second, liberal audiences are much more likely to boycott/shun people with whom they disagree politically. As a result it is economically much safer to play to that side of the aisle.
 

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