The Honest Scholar

NPR’s Robert Siegel  interviews a Harvard researcher – Professor Thomas Abt, of Harverd’s Law School and Kennedy School – about the recent spike in violent crime.

They try to get Abt to blame the ownership of guns by law-abiding civilians.

Abt doesn’t:

SIEGEL: First, let me put to you a very common reaction to rising violent crime or rising murder rates. It’s guns. It’s the number of guns that are out there. Can we say that’s a cause?

ABT: I think it’s unlikely. The reason is I don’t think anything is fundamentally changed in the gun markets in the United States. The second reason is because overwhelmingly gun crime is perpetrated with weapons that are already illegal.

SIEGEL: So there’s a relationship to violent crime, but it’s not necessarily a relationship to a spike in violent crime over the past couple of years.

ABT: Yes. That’s the tension. On all sides, there is an urge to simplify these issues down to one factor, and it’s usually the factor that that particular person or constituency cares most about.

And NPR actually ran it.

My shocked face doesn’t translate to print well, unfortunately.

7 thoughts on “The Honest Scholar

  1. I am also shocked – but not for the same reasons. It stunned me that NPR actually addressed a topic other than race and gender. That has got to be some kind of first – but as for the interview, you have to hear like NPR hears it:

    SIEGEL: It’s guns. It’s the number of guns that are out there. Can we say that’s a cause?

    ABT: blah, blah, blah.

    SIEGEL: So there’s a relationship to violent crime.

    ABT: blah, blah, blah.

  2. I attended a seminar a couple of years ago where the speaker was Dan Buettner, author of the “Blue Zones” books about longevity. (Blue Zones are areas where people live exceptionally longer than the average, and his team studied the reasons for this). During the Q&A someone asked if the longevity in these zones was enhanced by gun control laws.

    Buettner, who has somewhat lefty leanings (compassionately, of course), somewhat sheepishly noted that the areas with the longest life spans typically don’t have any gun laws.

  3. It’s always nice to find that there are honest academics out there. In the soft/social sciences they’re becoming an endangered species.

  4. wht do you listen to MPR?That’s my shock. I either listen to the patriot KFAN, or 93X

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.