Why These Senators Want John Lott Fired, Now

John Lott

by Frank Miniter: So, earlier this fall, John Lott accepted a position at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Specifically, he went to work as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the Office of Justice Programs—this is a DOJ division that quietly gives out $5 billion in grants annually. Sounds like a boring job for a statistician and researcher, right?

Not exactly.

This DOJ division has given millions of dollars to academics—some who have a clear bias against your right to keep and bear arms. In his new role as an adviser, it is unclear whether Lott has yet been able to bring some balance to these massive grant allocations—DOJ-funded studies that, when they come out, often feed the mainstream news with “research” arguing that good, old-fashioned American freedom is not such a good thing after all.

If Lott, who is well-known for digging deep into the details about gun ownership and crime rates, is able to influence how this money is allocated, he could affect the left’s ideological quest to ban and confiscate the citizenry’s guns. (If you don’t know Lott, go to the Crime Prevention Research Center’s website, a group Lott founded, and check out some of the research papers Lott has written and co-written, or take a look at his many books on the subject—the left hates Lott, as he not only tells the truth about guns in America, but he also backs his words up with data.)

So, when word got out that Lott is working at the DOJ, the left demanded his job.

First came the gun-control groups, which all came out with this news on the same day (November 24), all demanding Lott be fired. Then came petitions on social media that Lott be fired—these were led by the gun-control groups.

Now nine U.S. Senators—including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—have sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr demanding information on Lott’s hiring. The letter calls Lott “a pro-gun advocate who claims that widespread gun ownership can reduce crime.” This is nothing more than an ideologically motivated slur. Lott is a researcher and an academic who has taught at many universities. His peer-reviewed research has clearly shown that gun ownership tends to reduce crime.

These senators want to know if Lott is a political appointee or if he is serving in a “career civil service position.” The intent of this is clear: They want to know how easy it will be to fire him, so they can thereby protect money going to anti-Second Amendment research, if Joe Biden is sworn in as president on January 20.

They also want Barr to give them a list of “all individuals who held positions as political appointees since January 20, 2017, and are now employed in permanent competitive positions, non-political excepted service positions, or career Senior Executive Service (SES) positions at the Department and its components.”

These senators clearly want a list from the DOJ so they can target and remove people who came in during the Trump administration. As with Lott, they want to cancel these people, too.

This is nothing new for Lott. In 2017, left-wing groups publicly tried (and succeeded) to get The Hill to stop publishing Lott’s opinion articles. They also petitioned many other publications that dared to publish Lott’s research and have had considerable success in getting him shunned.

Gun-control groups find Lott’s well-researched studies to be inconvenient to their desire for more gun control—inconvenient because, as the facts continually show, freedom does work. These gun-control groups can’t win debates about the data, so they are doing everything in their power to cancel Lott.

As we have reported before, this has included bans by Twitter.

These senators, and the anti-gun groups that support them, are not interested in a robust, First Amendment-style debate about what really makes America safer. They want control. To get control, as they can’t win fact-based discussions, they’re opting to attempt to cancel Lott, to cancel the NRA and, yes, they’ll try to cancel you too, if, that is, you get in their way.
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Frank Miniter is Editor in Chief of America's 1st Freedom.

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