Katie Couric’s gun control documentary “Under the Gun” was released May 15 without any portion of a four-hour interview conducted with John Lott, Jr.
Lott is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and a known gun scholar whose seminal work is More Guns, Less Crime.
On May 6, Lott tweeted that he had been “interviewed for 4 hours” for Couric’s film and he “bet” that four hours would be reduced to a “select few minutes” of actual screen time. The reduction happened alright. But instead of using those select few minutes, Couric and director Stephanie Soechtig cut Lott’s interview altogether.
According to The Guardian, Soechtig said:
[Lott’s] research has been criticized and largely discredited, and when we went to include it in the film, it felt like unnecessary real estate to put in the film, because we know his research has been debunked many times. We kept going back to the idea that we wanted to reserve the real estate in the film for the responsible gun owners.
Breitbart News previously reported that Couric was interviewed on NBC’s Today on May 13 to promote her film and she said said a “silent majority” of gun owners actually want more gun control. Moreover, she said the claim that armed good guys stop bad guys is “a specious argument.”
It is interesting to note that the homepage for “Under The Gun” touts the film as “an important opportunity for all Americans to learn the facts about one of the most important issues our country is facing today, the gun debate.” It appears that is only true if the “facts” you are after do not run counter to the “facts” Soechtig and Couric would like to convey.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.