The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Newsweek, US News and World Report and Philadelphia Enquirer—among many others—have all gushed recently with some variation on the story that “Strict Licensing in Connecticut Cut Firearms Homicides by 40 percent,” according to the American Journal of Public Health.
Hold on just one teeny, tiny, itsy-bitsy minute, says Dr. John Lott: Without cherry-picking, omissions and distortions in the data, it simply isn’t true. Perhaps worse, he continues, is, “Why the authors … chose to ignore other violent crimes also becomes clear pretty quickly. Relative to the rest of the United States, Connecticut’s overall violent crime rate, as well as its robbery and aggravated assault rates, were clearly falling prior to the 1995 law and rising afterwards.”
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