Merced
tlambert | July 11, 2007David Friedman examines John Lott's claims that safe storage laws were to blame for the deaths in the Merced pitchfork murders, and comes to similar conclusions to me:
Putting it all together, I conclude that the Merced murders provide evidence against gun control laws, but weaker evidence than John Lott (and Vin Suprynowicz, from whom I think John got the original story) claim. Even without safe storage laws, the parents of small children--one of them was nine, I don't know if she was the youngest--would be likely to keep firearms unloaded and on a high shelf or otherwise out of easy reach.…
tlambert | August 29, 2003 In his book The Seven Myths of Gun Control, Richard Poe has an extensive account of the murders. He is much more careful with his facts than the other pro-gun writers who hang an attack on safe storage laws on the tragedy. He interviewed the mother of the victims and contradicts claims claims by Suprynowicz and Lott that"the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight."
According to Poe, the gun was not locked, but stored unloaded on a high shelf. And she did not run to where the gun was stored. The killer…
tlambert | May 29, 2003Lott has blogged for the third time about the Merced murders: Taken together, the different articles in these various posts indicate that the gun was locked; it was placed in a way that was not accessible by the children; both the father and the great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, believed that if the gun had been accessible children's lives would have been saved; and these moves were done because of fear of the California state law.
And for the third time he has neither supported nor admitted as false this claim from his new book: "the sensible girl ran for…
tlambert | May 28, 2003Lott has a new entry on his blog where he posts a transcript from Fox News that apparently has the father of the murdered children saying: "If a gun would have been here today, I'd have at least a daughter alive."
I was mistaken when I suggested that the quote was a fabrication. The quote implies that all his daughters were murdered when they weren't, but perhaps it didn't imply this in its original context.
In any case Lott has not responded to the rest of my post, instead concentrating on one minor point. In two blog postings now Lott has neither…
tlambert | May 27, 2003Lott has started a blog and responded to the questions I raised about his claims about the Merced pitchfork murders: Fox News interviewed the father of the dead children and reported the following:"Lott cited a Merced, Calif. family whose guns were put away because of the state's safe storage law. John Carpenter, who lost two children in an attack in 2000, said a gun would have stopped the man who broke into his home with a pitchfork. 'If a gun had been here, today I'd have at least a daughter alive,' Carpenter said."
It doesn't appear that Fox News interviewed the father at…
tlambert | May 26, 2003I found a copy of the Fresno Bee story that Lott claimed"included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents' bedroom, got out their handgun---and was unable to use it because of the trigger lock that her father had put on in obedience to a recent state law."
Of course it doesn't include that "fact", which would appear to be a fabrication.
tlambert | May 23, 2003In chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns, where Lott argues that "safe storage" laws cause increases in violent crime, he quotes from an op-ed: Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot ... Under the new "safe storage" laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone ... so that's just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done.... [The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork ... had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into…