John Lott responds to National Academy's study

Here is John Lott's response to the recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that all the research done to date shows neither an increase or reduction in gun crime following either gun control laws or right-to-carry laws.

While more research is always helpful, the notion that we have learned nothing flies in the face of common sense. The NAS panel should have concluded as the existing research has: Gun control doesn’t help.

Instead, the panel has left us with two choices: Either academia and the government have wasted tens of millions of dollars and countless man-hours on useless research (and the panel would like us to spend more in the same worthless pursuit), or the National Academy is so completely unable to separate politics from its analyses that it simply can’t accept the results for what they are.

Think what you will about John Lott and his research and his methods, but I'm with him on this one. I think the NAS is wrong, and that liberal gun ownership does decrease crime ("An armed society is a polite society"). But ignore my belief that they're wrong, and consider this: isn't more freedom always better, especially in situations that even the pro-big government-types and gun control (AKA victim disarmament) advocates admit that they're not sure which policy is "better"?