Mary Rosh's blog

If you don't know who Mary Rosh is, you might want to read "The Mystery of Mary Rosh". Also of interest might be the blog post that unmasked Mary, and the latest Mary Rosh news.

[Editor's note: Most of these postings were made to Usenet. Some were made to comment sections on blogs, two are comments on www.freerepublic.com and one is a review posted to Amazon.com. I collected them here for easy reference. ]

1999-08-18

Mary Rosh:

SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK -- GREAT BUY!!!!
Reviewer: maryrosh (see more about me) from Philadelphia
If you want to learn about what can stop crime or if you want to learn about many of the myths involving crime that endanger people's lives, this is the book to get. It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well. He explains things in an understandable commonsense way. I have loaned out my copy a dozen times and while it may have taken some effort to get people started on the book, once they read it no one was disappointed.If you want an emotional book, this is not the book for you. If you want a book with the facts, a book that tells you the benefits and risks from protecting yourself and your family from crime, a book that will explain the facts in a straightforward and clear way, this is the book to get.This is by far the largest most comprehensive study on crime, let alone on gun control. Professor Lott examines crime rates as well as accidental gun deaths and suicides for all 3,056 counties in the United States by year for 18 years. By comparison, the previous largest study on gun control examined 170 cities within one single year 1980. Lott examined 54,000 observations and the previous largest study looked at 170 observations. Lott used all the FBI data that was available from the first year that they released the county level data to the last year that they had put it out when he wrote his book. Unlike other studies, Lott used all the data that was available. He did not pick certain cities to include and others to exclude. No previous study had accounted for even a small fraction of the variables that he accounted for.

[Editor's note: This review has been deleted from Amazon.com]

2000-06-02

Mary Rosh:

If you want to read the research paper upon which this research is based, go to:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?ABSTRACT_ID=228534

The papers that get downloaded the most get noticed the most by other academics. It is very important that people download this paper has frequently as possible.

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[Editor's note: The paper she is asking people to download as frequently as possible is by John Lott]

2000-08-22

Mary Rosh:

RUSH SHOULD READ THIS:How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

Culture/Society Front Page News Keywords: GIVING WOMEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE
Source: Social Science Research Network
Published: December 1999 Author: John R. Lott, Jr.
Posted on 08/22/2000 11:18:12 PDT by Mary Rosh

You have got to download this paper. Lott has done an amazing piece here. Fits in perfectly with Rush Limbaugh's program today. Click on source URL above to get the paper.

How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?

John R. Lott, Jr.

Abstract:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

Lott does it again.

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2000-10-02

Mary Rosh:

There is a huge difference between Bush and Gore. Whether it is price controls on drugs or gun control, once you get these restrictions in effect it will extremely difficult to get rid of these rules. Four more years of a Democratic administration and most gun companies will not be around.

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2000-11-20

Mary Rosh:

You can download a copy of this article at:

http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=245336

Since the papers at SSRN are ranked on the basis of the number of downloads, downloading the paper is essentially a vote for this type of research and encourages more of it to be done.

Other work by Lott can be found at:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=16317

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2001-07-24

James Simpson:

What!?!? You've once again stated your opinion as fact. You have not proved ANY "easily identified mistakes by Klinkner". You've only stated this is your opinion. I believe Klinkner did an excellent and very thorough job. Klinkner had the advantage of having the data from both Lichtman and Lott available for his analysis, and he built on that data, possibly slightly improving on Lichtman's analysis, and showing that Lott's analysis is flawed. I have a couple questions for you: 1) What is your level of knowledge of statistics? You act as though you have some special knowledge in this area, but have not stated this explicitly. I don't claim to be an expert in stat's, but I did take a graduate level course in Research & Statistics some years ago, so I do have some knowledge here. Again I'm not an expert, but what is your knowledge here? 2) Do you happen to work for Lott in some capacity? Or are you a personal friend of his or something? You seem to have a personal stake in defending Lott.

Mary Rosh:

I do have a Ph.D. in economics. You are extremely emotional on the issue of Lott and Klinker and have made all sorts of charges. Why are you so emotional? Are you Klinker? Let's try to just stick to the facts here.

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[Editor's note: Klinkner emailed me to say that he is not James Simpson.]

2001-07-27

Mary Rosh:

If you are interested in Belleslies book, you should read the devistating review of it by Strassel in the Wall Street Journal. I have reprinted it below, but among the amazing things is that Belleslies has lost his data so that no one can replicate his results. More amazing the one data source that he cites in the book for probate records, which he claims isn't really the one he used even if it is the one that he cites and even though the numbers for everything else that people own match what he has in the book, doesn't produce the low gun ownership rates that he claims. The numbers that others have found looking at this data is several time what Belleslies claims to have found. Belleslies is a fraud.

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2001-08-05

James Simpson:

Mary, I don't know why you've taken it so personally that I expressed by opinion about the shoddy and unscientific nature of John Lott's so-called "research". I have backed up my statements with facts, numerous cites, and examples. And yes, Lott's other research is germane to discussion of his study of the Florida election, because his other work betrays, not only a partisan advocate, but one who's data, and conclusions from that data, has been disputed by a number of prominent researchers as being false and misleading. You've called me "emotional" and "pathetic", when I've called you no names whatsoever. This indicates to me that you realize you've lost the debate, that it is obvious from Lott's categorical pronouncement that "More Guns, Less Crime", that Lott is in fact a fraud and not an unbiased researcher. Lott is not a scientist, because he fails to follow the most basic principles of science, namely caution and extensive use of qualifiers in drawing conclusions from research (i.e. "More guns may decrease crime .. in these specific instances ... in this geographic area" etc.).

I'm sorry if you're taking this personally, but you are not John Lott.

Mary Rosh:

Klinkner (I mean James):

Why are you so emotional on this? Why do you focus so much on personal attacks on Lott and an emotional defenses of Klinkner? Why don't you want to debate the contents of the papers?

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2001-07-26

Mary Rosh:

This posting is filled with lies. Lott is not a "shill" for anyone. Prove your claim. If you are referring to claims by gun control groups like Handgun Control (now the Brady Group) and the Violence Policy Center that Lott has been paid by gun makers that has been proven false. The Chicago Tribune looked into this and found those claims to be false.

The claim that there is a huge list of academics who have found fault with Lott's research is false. As a former academic, I have kept up with this debate and there are only a few critical papers (you cite the authors for two of them below).

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2001-09-09

Mary Rosh

As to the list of people you put down, notice that none of them one
result that contradicted Lott's work on the Brady act, waiting
periods, or safe storage laws, one-gun-a-month rules.

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2001-10-05

Russ Anderson

link:

Lott writes ''If national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.'' In fact, Kleck's survey [15] indicates that 24% fired the weapon and the NCVS indicates that 40% fired the weapon [25]. Five other surveys give numbers between 34% and 67% [14].

In the second edition Lott changes ''national surveys'' to ''a national survey that I conducted''. While that makes his statement technically correct, it is still highly misleading, since it does not mention the seven surveys that contradict Lott's own, unpublished, one.

Lott sited "national surveys" but in reality it was his own, unpublished, one (in the above example). Does that difference constitute "outright fraud" or simply very misleading?

Mary Rosh

Bellesiles changes his stories multiple times on where he got the California data and it turns out after each new story that the data was not at the place that he claimed. Other data that he used from the Northeast was off by a factor of 4 times. The Boston Globe also really nailed him on the complete mischaracterization of the quotes regarding guns being broken. Their September 11th story went through example after example where he had claim that the probate records listed a broken gun when in fact they did no such thing. He also has many dozens of quotes that do not fit the original sources he sites. As people have said, he may have accidentally misphrased something a couple of times, but not more than 50 times.

You provide one example from Lott that isn't even a clear case and in any case could have been a simple lack of clarity even if you are right.

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2001-10-12

raven:

Even excluding this data set, a decrease in murder is claimed, correct?

Tim Lambert:

But the decrease is not statistically significant (even after allowing for the fact that a non-randomly chosen state was excluded).

MaryRosh:

This is simply dishonest and a typcial Lambert distortion. Even dropping out counties with fewer than 100,000 people and all Florida counties, Black and Nagin find a 6.3 percent drop in Assaults (significant at the 1 percent level) and a 4.6 percent drop in robberies (significant at the 6 percent level).

Tim Lambert

That's assaults, not murders. That's robberies, not murders.

You owe me an apology.

Mary Rosh:

I don't owe you an apology.

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2001-11-03

Mary Rosh:

I wanted and have asked severval times for the page for your 5 to 11 percent reference to Kleck where you claim that he is saying that is the percent of people who carried guns for protection prior to concealed handguns being legalized. You have still not provided a page number for that. Does this mean that you were just making things up? I know that you are.

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2001-11-09

Mary Rosh:

Why should Lott bother responding to a nothing like Lamber who isn't in the area and who isn't particularly honest? I don't even know why he responded to him once. In any case, if Lambert really cared about the truth he would acknowledge that Lott has dealt extensively with this discussion in his book. All I have done here is parrrot what Lott wrote.

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2001-11-09

Mary Rosh:

I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class when he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania back in the early 1990s, well before he gained national attention, and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn't know that he was a "right-wing" ideologue from the class. He argued both sides of different issues. He tore apart empirical work whether you thought that it might be right-wing or left-wing. At least at Wharton for graduate school or Stanford for undergraduate, Lott taught me more about analysis than any other professor that I had and I was not alone. There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material.

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2001-11-13

Mary Rosh:

YOU ARE AMAZINGLY DISHONEST. HAVE YOU ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME?

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2001-11-15

Tim Lambert:

Since the original data is still included, if I am right what you would see when extra data is added is a lessening of the effect. I reviewed Lott's results to see how they changed as the time period got longer. Unfortunately, since the specification of the model in table 9.1 is different from that in tables 4.8 and 4.13 the only comparison that can be made is that between the results in table 4.8 and 4.13. This shows the effect on violent crime lessening from -0.9% to -0.5% when the period of time studied increased by two years.

Mary Rosh:

When Lott added the data for the 1993 to 1994 period the strength of the results went up.

Tim Lambert:

Wrong. The difference between table 4.8 and table 4.13 was just the adding of data for 1993 and 1994.

Mary Rosh:

Boy, you are a dishonest person. You know as well as I do the addition for 1995 and 1996 were done in Chapter 9.

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2001-11-15

Tim Lambert:

surveys indicate that 5-11% of US adults admit to carrying guns for self-protection, dwarfing the 1% or so of the population that obtained concealed-weapon permits.

Mary Rosh:

These surveys are not based upon concealed carry but based upon any carrying of a gun. Lott addresses this in his book p. 230. These are not surveys for self defense as you claimed, but surveys involving any type of carrying guns for any reason (e.g., hunting, moving residences, etc.).

Tim Lambert:

Yes, Lott makes that claim, but anyone who reads chapter 6 of "Targetting Guns" can see that Lott does not know what he is talking about. I am surprised to find that Lott is unaware of current research on the frequency with which guns are carried for self-protection.

Mary Rosh:

Boy, that is a powerful and convincing response. Appeal to your authority as an expert.

Tim Lambert:

Did you even read what I wrote? I cited Chapter 6 of "Targetting Guns". Did you think I wrote "Targetting Guns"? Here's the complete reference (from the bibliography of my critique):

Gary Kleck. Targeting Guns: Firearms and their Control. Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1997.

On page 205, Kleck gives the actual question asked: "In the last twelve months, have you ever carried a gun away from home, either on your person, or in a vehicle, for protection against crime? Do not count carrying for recreation or in connection with duties in law enforcemnt, work as a security guard, or in the armed forces."

Mary Rosh:

I read what you wrote and I was referring to your last argument. I cited Lott and you cited Kleck. Your last claim was simply about how we should trust your judgment, which for obvious reasons I am unwilling to do.

Tim Lambert:

Yet again you fail to follow an extremely simple argument. If I had, out of the blue, without offering any supporting cites or arguments, asserted that Lott was unfamilar with current research on the frequency of gun carrying, then that would be asking people to trust my judgement. Instead, I gave a cite to a source where the questions and methodology of the survey were described. Since it is crystal clear from the question that recreational carrying was specifically excluded, I concluded that Lott had not actually looked at the survey question. I hope that you get it now.

Mary Rosh:

I have cited an expert who claims that the survey is much broader than you what you cite. Since both references have the 5 to 11 percent claim and given the debate that Lott references, it appears that both are dealing with the same evidence. You disregard the expert that I reference, fine.

Tim Lambert:

God forbid you should read the actual question and figure out which of Kleck or Lott is correct. I think that anyone can look at the question and what you are saying about it and form their own judgement about your credibility

Mary Rosh:

Lott claims that the question reads differently. I believe Lott, you can believe Kleck.

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2001-11-17

Mary Rosh:

Stop editing my responses! It is amazing enough that you distort and lie about what Lott says.

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2001-11-19

Tim Lambert:

X is positively correlated with Y, r=0.7. X is positively correlated with Z, r=0.7. Does it follow that Y is positively corrrelated with Z?

Mary Rosh:

Yes, of course.

Tim Lambert:

Nope. Here's a simple counterexample: Let Y and Z be independant r.v.s and let X = Y+Z. Then X is positively correlated with Y, X is positively correlated with Z and Y and Z are not correlated.

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2002-01-01

Mary Rosh:

In fact, in fewer than 1 out of a thousand defensive gun use cases is the attacker killed. The 98 percent of the time that guns are simply brandished are ignored. Warning shots are ignored.

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2002-01-27

Mary Rosh:

If a woman is being attacked by a 200 pound man, is she just supposed to wait until the police arrive? I am 114 lbs. and 5'6". What should I do in that situation?

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2002-01-30

Mary Rosh:

A kinfe is less lethal and it is also less of a defense. As a woman, who weighs 114 lbs, what am I supposed to do if I am confronted by a 200 lbs. man?

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2002-01-31

Mary Rosh:

Do you really think that most women can out run you typical criminal, a man between say 18 and 24 years of age? Even if I am not wearing heels, I don't think that there are many men that I could outrun, especially over a short distance. Unfortunately, women are not as fast as men on average.

As to me suggesting that I would kill someone over an argument, that is not a serious response. You obviously don't know what it is to be seriously threatened by someone who is much stronger than you are. If a criminal wanted to rape me or beat me or kill me, those are the cases that I am talking about. I work very late some nights. The security will only take me to the parking structure, though I frequently beg for them to go in with me and sometimes I am successful. What about my being at home alone? What am I supposed to do then if someone breaks in?

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2002-01-31

Mary Rosh:

I think that Lott was a research fellow at the law school. He had been a visiting professor at the university of chicago business school. I had him for a class at the Wharton Business School where he was a chaired professor, a position he held before he went to Chicago. After Chicago he was at the Yale Law School.

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2002-02-06

Mary Rosh:

Have you call up Lott?

Ed Huntress:

I talked to John Lott and learned that he hasn't even seen the New York Post's edited version of his editorial. He made some comments about it but I want to see if he has any further comments after he's read it. I'll let you know.

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[Editor's note: This is the end of a long exchange. You can read the whole thing here.]

2002-03-25

Mary Rosh:

I have a Ph.D. from Wharton in Public Policy and Management and have taken several graduate statistics classes.

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2002-05-08

Mary Rosh:

The Maltz and Targonski paper is not serious and the fact that you are pointing to this as strong evidence against Lott indicates that you are not seriously debating these issues.

Tim Lambert:

Translation: "I don't like the results of a paper that will appear in a refereed criminological journal."

Mary Rosh:

Translation: Lambert uncritically quotes articles that agree with his ideological feelings and doesn't allow arguments or reasoning to interfere with his ideological beliefs.

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2002-05-09

Mary Rosh:

I had Lott for classes when he was on the faculty at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. I know that he left there to go teach at the University of Chicago. He has probably published more research in refereed journals than almost anyone his age.

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2002-05-12

Mary Rosh:

Here again for the third time is a list of his publications:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Lott_v_Teret/Lott_Vita.html

This is four years old, but his publication list is clearly superior to Cook's both in terms of the quality of the journals and in terms of the number of publications. The contest isn't even close. How many publications does Cook have in the American Economic Review of the Journal of Political Economy or the Journal of Law and Economics?

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2002-06-09

Mary Rosh:

And they will be unable to defend themselves. What do you recommend that I as a 115 pound woman do against a 180 pound man who might want to rape or kill me? At least here in the US, I can carry a concealed handgun.

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2002-05-10

Mary Rosh:

Lott has published many academic articles in very prestigous journals. When I took a class from him at the Wharton School of Business in the early 1990s he was even then considered one of the young stars in the profession.

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2002-08-02

Mary Rosh:

Lott exposes the Maltz and Targonski paper as a sloppy fraud. This is a devistating piece. Gun control types are going to be sorry that they ever pointed to this paper.

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2002-08-03

Mary Rosh:

I was a graduate student at the Wharton School during the early 1990s and Lott taught me a graduate class on the political economy of government. As is true of many professors, Lott assigned some of these papers to the class and thus I have read them.

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2002-08-06

Mary Rosh:

Since I had Lott as a professor, I am undoubtedly biased, but it is also that experience that makes me believe that he is a fair person. He would constantly take positions on the left or right (often switching positions) to counter the arguments offered by students.

By the way, Lott has a long history of doing research on crime. I have heard him say that he started the research on guns at the Wharton School and I am not aware of any claims that the Wharton Business School got money from Olin.

Finally, I think the important question is whether the research stands up on its own. Unlike so many scholars, Lott has given out his data to all who have asked for it.

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2002-08-13

Mary Rosh:

He has served as chief economist of the United States Sentencing Commission and, at least when I had his class in the early 1990s, he had published many dozens of important papers in top journals on crime.

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2002-08-14

Mary Rosh:

Assume for a minute that everything that Lambert says about the Southwick piece is exactly correct. Assume that Southwick even did the right type of statistical test. I don't see where Lott claimed that the differences were statistically significant at the 95 percent level for a two-tailed t-test. Why isn't the standard the perponderance of the data? As far as I can tell, if you accept Southwick, no one is debating whether guns are the safest course of action one should take when confronted by a criminal. The question of significance for that result at the 95 percent level for a two-tailed t-test isn't even being debated here. Nor is anyone debating whether the point estimates indicate that we women appear to get a great benefit from using a gun than do men. If one is merely asking whether the perponderance of the evidence indicates that women get a bigger benefit, Lott's statement is exactly correct. Given the data, would you bet that women or men obtain a bigger benefit? Even if everything Lambert says about Southwick is true, Lott sure seems correct and Lambert, as usual, is distorting what he said.

gzuckier

Well, yes and no... I guess you are correct, Lott did not explicitly claim statistical signficance at any level, and his findings did show a preponderance of the evidence, as you say. While a professional journal would definitely have required him to have pointed out that the ratio was 'not statistically significant' or 'suggestive', this was not in a journal, but in the popular press where such points are not usually taken.

Tim Lambert

Actually they often do. Reports of opinion polls usually note that the result is plus or minus 3%. In this case the 95% confidence interval is 0.35 to 17.4. Baldly reporting the result as 2.5 when it might be an order of magnitude higher or lower is more than a little misleading. Lott should have known better.

Mary Rosh:

You haven't responded to how you mistated Lott's writing.

What Lott was focusing on was the benefit from using guns in defense. In any case, you still haven't responded to my point of whether one would bet that women or men got a bigger gain on average from having a gun. If you were Southwick, which way would you bet?

Polls frequently report confidence intervals (though what level of significance is used sometimes varies), but these are usually buried in the fine print and not more than a sentence in a long article mentions them.

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2002-09-04

Erhard Sanio

Nebenbei sind die von Lott unter dem Titel "More Guns - less Crime" behaupteten Wirkungen so schwach, dass sie keine Rechtfertigung fuer die negativen Wirkungen verbreiteten Schusswaffenbesitzes auf Gesundheit und Unfallgeschehen bieten. Sie beziehen sich auch eher auf das Recht des Waffenbesitzers, seine Schusswaffe verdeckt und schussbereit zu fuehren ("concealed carrying").
--
The worst thing people can expect from dioxin is a bad rash. John Lott

Mary Rosh:

You should be very careful relying on the Violence Policy Center, the source of this quote on Lott, for any information. This particular quote about dioxin is actual from a book review that Lott did of two books, where one of the books was making this claim.

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2002-09-04

Erhard Sanio

Muhaha. Meier mal wieder total sachlich
--
The worst thing people can expect from dioxin is a bad rash. John Lott

Mary Rosh:

You should be very careful relying on American groups such as the Violence Policy Center, where I presume you got this claim. The statement comes from two books that Lott was reviewing, where one of the books made this claim.

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2002-09-05

Erhard Sanio

Du hast einfach einen Riss in der Schuessel. Saddam ist ein stinknormaler Drittwelttyrann, wie ihn die "Freie Welt" am Dutzend ein- und abgesetzt hat. Und Vollkoffer wie Du sehen nicht, dass das eine der Hauptursachen fuer Hass und Fanatismus ist.
--
The worst thing people can expect from dioxin is a bad rash. John Lott

Mary Rosh:

You should be very careful relying on the Violence Policy Center, the source of this claim, for any information. THis statement is from a book review that Lott did of two books, where one of the books that he was reviewing made this claim.

Erhard Sanio

You should be very careful about EMP rules, also know as spam rules, in the Usenet. Your posting gives the impression of an automatical post consisting of a full quote of the article responding to and an identical phrase every time. This meets the spam definition under the terms of "advertising the same service".

If you don't stop sending automated messages, i shall file a spam complaint as well at the Usenet backbone admins, where it will lead to spam cancels of your automated messages once BI is exceeded (which will occur soon) as with your site admins and providers at google, speakeasy.net and AOL.

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2002-09-21

Tim Lambert:

He wasn't a professor at Chicago. He was a visiting fellow.

Mary Rosh:

Well, I can only vouch for the fact that I took classes from Professor Lott when he taught at the Wharton Business School. He was a professor there. Let's see. Prominent research positions at Stanford, University of Chicago, Yale, and Wharton. I am sure that you are just as qualified to do research as Lott and I will probably agree that it doesn't matter that your Ph.D. is in computer science, but let's get past these types of arguments, please.

2002-09-23

Mary Rosh:

The Ayres and Donohue piece is a joke. I saw it a while ago. Their own county level data that did the year by year breakdown actually showed that Lott and Mustard were correct, but they weren't smart enough to know it. A friend at the Harvard Law School said that Donohue gave the paper there and he was demolished on this and other points. I haven't checked their paper again, but do they still have the county level breakdown by year or did they remove it because it was the most general test and it went the wrong way from their perspective? What academic journal are they going to get it publshed in?

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2002-10-19

Mary Rosh:

I had Lott as a teacher about a decade ago, and he has a quite noticable scar across his forehead. It looked like it cut right through his eyebrows going the entire width of his forehead. While I never heard him discuss what caused it, the scar was so extremely noticable that people talked and joked about it. Some students claimed that he had major surgery when he was a child.

Whatever caused the scar, it is too bad you can't share with us what he said instead of focusing on some medical problem that he probably had as a child.

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2002-10-24

Mary Rosh:

Possibly as a man you don't notice the differences in strength and size as much as women do. I wouldn't want to fight someone who weighed 50 pounds more than me.

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2002-10-31

Mary Rosh:

Here are a few articles that talk about how high the violent crime rate is in Britain (the first piece also mentions that Australia is number 2 right behind Britain). They also mention how violent crime has increased in Britain.

Let's see dishonest Lambert dismiss this.

Tim Lambert:

Newspaper articles are not the most accurate source of information. If you look at the official statistics, the violent crime rate has declined significantly since 1995. See: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/malcolm.html

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2002-10-31

Mary Rosh:

Where is Tim Lambert on this? I have seen him vigorously try defending Bellesiles in the past, but he is no where to be seen on this topic now.

Clayton Cramer:

Unlike certain other people who continue to defend Bellesiles, Lambert isn't stupid.

Mary Rosh:

Fine, will he admit that Bellesiles is wrong? Or is it only that he knows that he can no longer successfully publicly defend Bellesiles?

Clayton Cramer

Over in misc.fitness.weights, someone asked him his opinion. He responded with links to Lindgren's Yale Law Journal article, and the final report of Emory's external committee.

Tim Lambert

The someone who asked was Mary Rosh, by the way.

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2002-11-04

Mary Rosh:

You write "I wouldn't 'do' anything to John Lott besides reject him for publication, which I did." Are you saying that you are an academic and that you have actually referred a paper of Lott's that was submitted to a journal? Was it a real academic journal? I have some familiarity with journals. Which one was it and what piece of his did you referee? Or am I just completely misinterpreting what you are saying. Was it just for some type of nonacademic publication that you rejected his piece for?

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2002-12-20

Mary Rosh

As to his supposed biases, when I took Lott for classes about a decade ago, he assigned some of his papers on political markets that I think some would probably classify as leftwing. His work went through a lot of examples of so-called "political market failure" and argued that political markets worked quite well. Other papers hit what would be described as conservative, but the main conclusion that I got was that he was willing to be objective and that it was risky to predict what he would find.

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2003-01-04

Mary Rosh:

The only ones who believe in magic are the ones who think that the police will always be there to protect them. As the book you dismiss says, guns make it easier for bad things to happen, but they also make it easier for people to protect themselves. I weight 120 lbs. What do you suggest that I do if I have to confront 180 lbs man? Is there even a contest? If it takes 15 minutes for the police to arrive, is that the type of risk that you want your wife or girl friend to take?

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2003-01-15

Mary Rosh:

I saw Clayton mention elsewhere in this post that we are talking about fewer than twenty people using guns defensively. Something like 1 percent of those surveyed. If so, I would assume that the confidence interval is fairly large. Could Clayton tell us the siize of the difference in the two surveys? Are we talking about 30 percent or something much larger than that?

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2003-01-16

Mary Rosh:

I had Lott as a professor at Wharton during the early 1990s and he was very balanced and challenged students on both sides of an issue.

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2003-01-18

Mary Rosh:

I am curious how long do you or Lambert keep your cancelled checks? How many years back do you keep your e-mails? Suppose that someone did yard work for you six years ago, could you prove that they did it? Do you have cancelled checks from then? If it was a company that did it for just one summer, do you remember its name?

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2003-01-18

Mary Rosh:

Other blogs have gone into this issue in much more detail. My understanding is that Lott has done two surveys that have come to similar conclusions about defensive gun use rates In one that was done six years ago, there was a hard disk crash and the data was lost. The data had been used for one number in one sentence in a book with thousands of numbers. What is the big deal? So he lost one piece of data years ago and has apparently told people for years that the data was lost. The fact that a second survey finds similar results seems pretty important to me.

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2003-01-20

Mary Rosh:

You are going to have egg all over your face on this one Lambert. You are already starting to look desparate. Six years is a really long time to ask people for records for, and yet different people have confirmed different parts of Lott's discussion. But I will tell you what. If you get Professor Mustard to agree with your interpretation of what he said, I will agree with you. For some reason, I bet that you are not even going to try asking him. You are a professor (right?), so just ask him one professor to another about whether your interpretation is correct.

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2003-01-20

Mary Rosh:

By the way TIm, what about the fact that Lott's 2002 survey apparently produces the same results? Do you think that survey was fabricated? Was it just dumb luck that Lott guessed correctly what the results would be?

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2003-01-21

Mary Rosh:

Everyone agrees that Lott lost a hard disk six years ago. I don't keep track of my checks for six years. Lindgren might find it surprising that people don't keep telephone records for six years, but I sure as heck don't. Why Lindgren discounted statements from Professor David Mustard and Geoffrey Huck because they couldn't remember precises points in 1997 when events occurred then is beyond me. Everyone also agrees that Lott has gone out of his way to continually give out his data immediately. That he had to put together the other data that was lost for his gun research. This seems like exemplary attempts to share data. How many people share their data, let alone put it together again so that his critics who hate him and do things like spread these lies?

Critics such as Lambert and Lindgren ought to slink away and hide.

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2003-01-21

Mary Rosh:

"late claim of a lost survey" -- what a joke. Lott's post and even Lindgren's reports have indicated that this has been known to the critics since 1999. Why were they going after this now four years later? David Mustard is quoted by Lindgren as saying that he knew about the lost survey data in 1997, though Lindgren doesn't give this much weight apparently because Mustard could only give a range of time during 1997 when he would have been told. You site also quoted Geoff Huck and I saw someplace else mention that Huck actually had an e-mail from late July 1997 confirming the lost hard drive.

By the way, it seems that Lindgren has long accepted that there was a hard drive crash in 1997 and that Lott lost lots of data. Why has it been so hard, especially with points by Mustard and Huck, to believe that the evidence was more consistent than not with the survey data being lost?

I don't think that you have any reason to say that the lost data "looked fishy on face." By the way, when did people contact Lott for his side of the story? I have seen some references to the fact that they posted these reports before contacting him. If so, it was really wrong for you to come to any conclusion about something looking fishy. I had Lott as a professor in the early 1990s and he was always very nice and fair to people. I can only imagine the type of hell that you all put him through if you were indeed publishing these reports without first at least asking him for comment.

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2003-01-22

Mary Rosh:

From: MaRyRoSh@aol.com
To: CalPundit
Subject: Sorry

You are correct. The MaRyRoSh pen name account was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons. (They later got their own accounts but this one was never erased.) I shouldnt have used it, but I didnt want to get directly involved with my real name because I could not commit large blocks of time to discussions. (However, I never subscribed to the firearmsregprof posting hosted by Volokh.)

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