John Lott: 'No Real Scientific Evidence' Background Checks Reduce Crime

In a March 3 Investor’s Business Daily editorial, John R. Lott, Jr. highlights the failures of the Brady Law over its 20 year existence, specifically pointing out that the background checks associated with it do not reduce crime.

This is crucial information for gun owners and would-be gun owners who are constantly bombarded with the idea that background checks are good and need to be expanded to cover all sales now.

According to Lott, of the 76,142 background checks denials in 2010, many were cleared up after the “initial” denial, 44 were prosecuted, and “only 13 [people] were convicted of illegally trying to purchase a gun when they were prohibited from doing so.” And the 13 who were convicted were people “with relatively trivial records from years earlier that didn’t realize their offense was covered” by a background check when they went to buy a gun: “hardly what one would call dangerous criminals.”

Lott then adds the clincher: “There is no real scientific evidence among criminologists and economists that background checks actually reduce crime.” He points to a 2004 National Academy of Sciences panel that specifically concluded Brady Law background checks “did not reduce violent crime, not even a single category of violent crime.”

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