Radio host John Cardillo claims that interview segments with noted gun scholar John Lott were included in the earliest version of Katie Couric’s gun control movie Under the Gun, but were taken out at Michael Bloomberg’s request following a private screening.
Cardillo is host of The John Cardillo Show, while Lott is an economist, gun rights author and president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
On May 16, Breitbart News reported that Couric’s gun control documentary left four hours of an interview with Lott on the cutting room floor. In an interview with The Guardian, director Stephanie Soechtig explained their decision to omit the Lott interview in its entirety:
“[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.”
But Cardillo says his brother knows one of the individuals that financed the movie, and that that financier says portions of Lott’s interview were included in the earliest version of the movie, only to be taken out at Bloomberg’s request.
During his own live interview with Lott earlier this month, Cardillo said:
“I don’t know if you know this… I don’t know if we spoke about this, but my brother knows one of the financiers on the Katie Couric project — he was sort of an ancillary financier who’s actually pro-Second Amendment — and he told me your footage from that documentary was cut after a private between Katie Couric and Michael Bloomberg.”
Lott responded that he had not heard that. Cardillo then reiterated: “Yes. They were going to run it, and Bloomberg and Couric had a private screening and after that screening is when your footage was cut.”
Breitbart News spoke to Lott on Monday about Cardillo’s claims.
“Katie Couric and her staff interviewed me for almost six hours — two hours pre-interview and then almost four hours on tape — and what I found is that the filming that they did of me was used extensively in the movie, originally,” Lott told Breitbart News. “But Katie Couric did a private screening for Michael Bloomberg and Bloomberg apparently insisted that anything from me be removed from the movie.”
Lott said he has grown accustomed to “Bloomberg’s people” canceling or shutting down his appearances when they have the opportunity to do so.
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is the founder of the gun control organization Everytown for Gun Safety.
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.