John Lott Exposes Fuzzy Bloomberg Math

Apparently, Michael Bloomberg didn’t learn his lesson after one of his two anti-gun groups, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), was taken to task for claiming that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, shot by police, was a “victim of gun violence.”

Last week, Bloomberg’s other gun control group, which he markets as a “Moms” group, teamed with MAIG to release propaganda intended to convey the impression that school shootings are on the rise.

However, in an article for Fox News, economist John Lott showed that the shootings cited by Bloomberg included suicides, incidents in which no one was injured, at least one self-defense shooting, and shootings that took place late at night on and off school property. “Contrary to what many people believe, high school shootings have actually been falling over the last two decades,” Lott wrote. 

This week, Lott assailed a “study” coming out of the Bloomberg-financed Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which claims that Missouri’s murder rate increased, relative to the national rate, after 2007, when the state rescinded its law requiring background checks on all handgun purchases. Lott noted that Missouri’s murder trend, relative to the national trend, improved after 2007, and faulted the study for not comparing Missouri to the 16 states that continued to have such background checks laws after 2007.

“The reason for this cherry picking is obvious,” Lott concluded. “Only those conditions produced the desired results. For example, Missouri’s violent crime rate fell 7 percent faster than the violent crime rate for the rest of the United States from 2006 to 2012.”