Politico published a smarmy little story this morning where they allege that there is simply no way that defensive use of firearms can be used as much as has been cited. This cannot be done, they claim, because people must lie.

Politico cites a professor at Harvard, David Hemenway, who claims that several factors with Gary Kleck and Marc Getz's research means their findings were invalid. Bold my emphasis:

First, there is the social desirability bias. Respondents will falsely claim that their gun has been used for its intended purpose—to ward off a criminal—in order to validate their initial purchase. A respondent may also exaggerate facts to appear heroic to the interviewer.

Second, there’s the problem of gun owners responding strategically. Given that there are around 3 million members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the United States, ostensibly all aware of the debate surrounding defensive gun use, Hemenway suggested that some gun advocates will lie to help bias estimates upwards by either blatantly fabricating incidents or embellishing situations that should not actually qualify as defensive gun use.

Third is the risk of false positives from “telescoping,” where respondents may recall an actual self-defense use that is outside the question’s time frame. We know that telescoping problems produce substantial biases in defensive gun use estimates because the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the gold standard of criminal victimization surveys, explicitly catalogs and corrects for it.

In my book, Hands Off My Gun, I devote entire chapters to debunking the propaganda, not research, employed by these groups. John Lott also validated defensige use in his book More Guns Less Crime. As permits for concealed carry soar and firearm purchases have increased, according to Hemenway's logic, this would result in increased crime rates—but it hasn't. Crime has consistently decreased in areas where concealed carry is permitted and newly added Chicago to this list is no exception. I noticed that Hemenway has offered no such rebuttal to Michael Bloomberg's professional antigun lobby groups Everytown and Moms Demand when they released their study of “school shootings” that falsely classified even drug deals gone wrong near —or often not anywhere near—school property, as “school shootings” to inflate numbers and make their cause more urgent.

By focusing on an attempt to discredit Gleck, Gertz, and Lott, Hemenway is skirting the very question which would end his query: are firearms used more for crime or not? The answer is simply NO. They are not. With millions of law-abiding gun owners in the United States the one common denominator of criminal acts committed with firearms is that the firearms in question are illegally possessed, used by repeat offenders who shouldn't have them and for whom no law would disarm. Hemenway can't speculate away cold hard fact.

I'll talk more about this on air today.

*UPDATE: John Lott adds: