Meet John Lott, the Man Who Wants to Arm America’s Teachers

Meet John Lott, the Man Who Wants to Arm America’s Teachers

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In the debate over gun control sparked by the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, most gun-rights advocates have been conspicuously silent. Not John Lott. Quite the opposite, he has been the loudest conservative voice publicly defending firearms. Mere hours after the massacre, he tweeted, “The most consistent feature of these attacks are that they occur in gun-free zones.” The next day he appeared on CNN and said, “Look at what has happened, all these attacks this year have occurred where guns are banned. Look at the Aurora movie theater shooting.”

As an erstwhile academic and longtime proselytizer for the crime-stopping value of guns, Lott has a freedom of movement in the post-Newtown debate that his less data-driven, Second Amendment–worshipping counterparts do not. A former American Enterprise Institute fellow, he isn’t just one of the foremost researchers on the side of the gun lobby; he’s the godfather of pro-gun scholarship