American Renaissance on the Liberal Mind

Opening Fire

Another debate in which the facts don’t matter.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws John R. Lott, Jr. University of Chicago 1998, 225 pp. $23.00

How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he knows about race, social policy, sex roles, individual differences, and even history that is not some combination of slogan, superstition, and fantasy. John Lott’s soberly brilliant More Guns, Less Crime could not possibly be a more convincing demonstration that what liberals think they know about guns is fantasy, too.

The liberal view, of course, is that private citizens should not have guns and that gun control will stop violence. Prof. Lott, who teaches law and economics at the University of Chicago, makes an air-tight case for the opposite view: that when citizens carry concealed weapons criminals are afraid to attack and violence declines. Prof. Lott’s approach is to track violent crime rates over time in those parts of the country that have liberalized gun laws as opposed to places that have not.

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The above excerpt is from Thomas Jackson’s review of More Guns, Less Crime, in the June, 2000 issue of American Renaissance, which issue can be read in its entirety for free at AmRen’s Web site.

The issue is up to AmRen’s usual high standards, with a cover story on how whites are being pushed out of Africa, and shorter stories on, among other subjects, African racism, university hate crime hoaxes committed by blacks, and whites who had been railroaded on phony “hate crime” charges.

For over 19 years, AmRen’s brilliant editor-publisher, Jared Taylor, has gotten every monthly issue out on time. But while you can read the June, 2000 issue, and over 200 other back issues for free, they cost real money to publish. As I have said before, AmRen is the gold standard, when it comes to the science and politics of race, with not just journalism but social science articles in its issues, and independent reports, such as The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America and Hispanics: A Statistical Portrait, which may also be downloaded for free at its Web site. I recommend, in particular, The Color of Crime, whose 2005 edition remains the state of the art in the criminology of race. I realize that tenured racial socialists (aka multiculturalists) will laugh at the preceding statement, but all an honest person needs to do is read The Color of Crime and the Department of Justice statistics on which it is based (and which are cited in its footnotes), and then read the tenured racial socialists’ alleged scholarship, to see who the laughing stock is.

While Jared Taylor eschews all luxuries to publish the magazine and reports on a shoestring; writers, editors, researchers, printers and the Post Office must all be paid. And I am proud to say that I am one of those writer-researchers. That’s why I’m asking you to please generously support American Renaissance with a subscription, and with a tax-deductible donation to its sponsor, The New Century Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Through December 31, any donations you make to The New Century Foundation can be written off of your 2009 taxes.

And while you’re at the site, please visit the AmRen bookstore, where you can purchase, at reasonable, and in some cases remarkably low prices, some of the most important books ever written on race, by authors such as Jared Taylor, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, Sam Francis, Carleton Putnam, Frank Salter and J. Philippe Rushton.

Thank you.

Nicholas Stix