Thus begins a commentary in today's New York Post by criminologist John Lott. The NAS, no friend of the right to keep and bear arms, spent years and millions of dollars in an attempt to show that gun control laws - from mandatory trigger locks to the ugly gun ban - work to reduce crime and accidental injuries.
They couldn't. Not one law was shown to help.
Not only that, they flatly ignored most of the studies that show that right-to-carry laws help. They did pay attention to some non-peer-reviewed papers - in science, as authoritative as the National Enquirer - and selectively quoted one study in an attempt to show that they don't reduce crime.
This result surprises me not at all. The panel was set up during the Clinton Administration and packed to the gills with gun haters. Only their scientific self-respect prevented them from whitewashing the results even more than they already have.
Meanwhile, those of us who understand that guns in the hands of the law-abiding are no threat to anyone but criminals will continue to debunk the gun-grabbing BS the Left continues to spout.