Second Amendment advocate John Lott offered a number of gun control activists a bet on the outcome of the policies enacted by the new anti-gun president of Brazil. Lott bet $1,000 that homicides would rise after gun controls were implemented and offered gun control activists the opportunity to bet against him. Lott is no novice on the relationship between guns and crime in Brazil. Susanne Edward of the NRA’s America’s First Freedom magazine reports:
So, John Lott, an author, former professor, and the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), decided to challenge all of the leading gun-control-promoting academics to a bet.
And this wouldn’t be some open-ended bet levelled at all possible challengers. Lott personally contacted a dozen gun-control-supporting academics and offered them a $1,000 wager on whether Brazil’s homicide rate will go up or down. If the homicide rate goes down as Brazil’s new leftist president enacts a long list of gun-control laws, Lott would pay them. If it goes up as the populace is choked with more gun-control laws, they would have to pay Lott. “The ultimate test of a theory is whether it accurately predicts what will happen,” said Lott, and these academics have predicted that gun bans will reduce the homicide rate.
He contacted Phil Cook, of Duke University; Jens Ludwig, of the University of Chicago; John Donohue, of Stanford Law School; Andrew Morral, of the Rand Corporation; Garen Wintemute, of the University of California, Davis; David Hemenway, of the School of Public Health, Harvard; Chris Koper, of George Mason University; Mark Siegel, of Boston University; Adam Winker, of the University of California, Los Angeles; Paul Helmke, of Indiana University; and Frank Zimring, of the University of California at Berkeley.
Lott notes that the media and gun-control advocates in academia predicted disaster in Brazil when Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who served as the 38th president of Brazil from 2019 until 2022, allowed private gun ownership in the country to increase by over 600%. But then the homicide rate actually fell. Later, when the socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, often simply referred to as “Lula,” the 39th and current president of Brazil, took over on Jan. 1, 2023, and as he signed an executive order banning the sales of guns and ammunition, banning concealed carry and more, many of these academics predicted that murder rates would fall.
“Well, they were wrong that Bolsonaro’s policy would increase murders,” said Lott. “The murder rate fell dramatically under Bolsonaro.” And now, months after Lott challenged these academics to put their money behind their publicly stated opinions, “none were willing to bet me,” said Lott.
Action Line: Despite Lott’s research showing that more guns equals less crime, there are still activists and politicians who want to take away your Second Amendment rights. Get your guns and your training now. And click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, and make yourself a Survivor.
