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Tim Lambert's weblog
Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
June 30, 2003
Category: Kellermann
gzuckier explains, in detail, what is wrong with Lott's criticism of Kellermann. For some reason, Kellermann's work seems to provoke badly flawed criticism. In another posting gzuckier demolishes three other critiques. In an earlier posting I noted that a critique...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 11:14 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2003
Category: links
After I linked to a posting by Cypren that attacked Fox News, Lott read the posting, construed it as an attack on himself and complained about it. Cypren's post seemed to me to quite clearly be an attack on Fox...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:48 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2003
Category: links
Terry Krepel writes about biased reporting from CNSNews.com. Krepel observes that their coverage of Lott exhibits bias by omission with two stories about Lott carefully avoiding mentioning the mysterious survey or Mary Rosh....
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:48 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2003
Category: misc
Lott has an editorial arguing that the US army would be better off if it didn't disarm Iraqi civilians. Kathy Kinsley agrees. What is notable about his piece is what he doesn't cite. In arguing that American soldiers would be...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 23, 2003
Category: links
Cypren criticizes Fox News for presenting this Lott op-ed as if it were a news story....
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:48 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
John Quiggin comments on this Gun Control Australia press release attacking John Whitley (see also Eugene Volokh's comments). Ditto on Quiggin's Voltaire/JS Mill allusions, but I think everybody is paying too much attention to this. I believe that they may...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2003
Category: misc
Brian Linse observes that while Eugene Volokh has criticized a study that found a link between gun ownership and homicide, he hasn't said anything about Lott. Linse writes: Bitching about "bogus" gun studies would impress me more if these same...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2003
Category: Appalachian
Tom Maguire has an interesting post which collects some links to blogspace discussion about the Appalachian Law School shootings. One interesting thing is that Lott and Kopel independently made the same error---they both claimed that the New York Times did...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:44 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2003
Category: Appalachian
Tom Spencer believes that I have essentially destroyed one of Lott's core arguments and wonders why pro-gun people continue to support him. There are two contradictory stories about what happened at the Appalachian Law School: Besen said that Odighizuwa set...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:44 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2003
Category: Appalachian
The centrepiece of Lott's The Bias Against Guns is the story he tells about the shootings at the Appalachian Law School. According to Lott, after killing three people Peter Odighizuwa was almost out of ammunition and was on his way...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:44 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
Lott has an update to his 6/13/03 post where he responds to this post. He writes: An e-mailer asks about whether the Ayres and Donohue piece in the American Law and Economics Review was refereed. While the original papers in...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2003
Category: safe-storage
Earlier I observed that Lott had claimed that a paper by Cummings et al that found a significant decline in juvenile accidental gun deaths following the introduction of safe storage laws was widely discredited because the researchers never factored in...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:05 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
Lott's 6/13/03 entry on his blog links to a letter from David Mayer printed in the Columbus Dispatch replying to a letter from Donohue. Mayer asserts: The recent letter by Stanford law professor John Donohue (June 7) nicely illustrates the...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
Category: survey
Lott has an interview on strike-the-root.com. He repeats some of the false claims discussed here earlier, such as his claim of a 440% increase in handgun crime in Sydney. He also claims: Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:05 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
In his 6/9/03 posting, Lott claims that Donohue has made a "large number of easily identifiable mistakes". Even if true, such mistakes pale into insignificance compared with the coding errors that Lott made but will not admit to, but let's...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 10, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
I asked Ben Horwich, the president of volume 55 of the Stanford Law Review to comment on Lott's latest complaints<.phpa>. He writes: I did not categorically promise Lott that we'd run a verbatim statement by Plassmann and Whitley. I did...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
Lott has a new posting where he has some more about the important matter of the coding errors in his data. Sandwiched between some more complaints about unfair the Stanford Law Review has been and some imaginary errors in Ayres...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
This is one of the graphs that Lott presented to the National Academy of Sciences Panel in 2002. David Mustard's originally included it in his contribution to Evaluating Gun Policy, but it was removed after Donohue showed him that...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
Category: survey
Tom Spencer thinks that the latest information on David Gross might be the straw that breaks the camel's back....
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:05 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 7, 2003
Category: More Guns Less Crime
Lott has a new posting where he responds to a letter from John Donohue to the Columbus Dispatch replying to a Lott op-ed. I earlier posted a link to the op-ed and a letter from Michael Maltz replying to it....
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:58 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2003
Category: cherry picking
Lott's comments about Australia that I discussed yesterday follow a similar pattern to those of many American pro-gunners. First, they greatly exaggerate the restrictions introduced in 1996, claiming that Australia "banned guns" or, in Lott's case claiming that Australia banned...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 5, 2003
Category: cherry picking
Lott has a new entry on his blog. First, he approvingly links to an NRO opinion piece by John Derbyshire, who writes about the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murdering a 16-year old burglar. Derbyshire feels that...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
Category: files
In The Latest Misfires in Support of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis Ayres and Donohue write: In the wake of some of the criticisms that we have leveled against the Lott and Mustard thesis, John Lott appeared before a...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 9:33 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
Category: survey
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story about David Gross, who, after all this time, is the only witness to Lott's 1997 survey who has ever been found: A major player and legal consultant on Minnesota's new gun-permit law is...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 3:05 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 3, 2003
Category: misc
Lott has responded to parts of my post yesterday. 1) "Why do you use the government's survey estimate for the number of crimes committed with guns but use other surveys in your two books for estimates on the number of...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 2, 2003
Category: misc
Lott has posted a transcript of the AEI event to publicize The Bias Against Guns. I'll try to correct some of the false statements in the transcript: In 2001, according to government survey evidence, there were about 450,000 crimes that...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
June 1, 2003
Category: cherry picking
In chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime Lott presents an analysis based on two exit polls of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purports to show that a 1% increase in a state's gun ownership causes a...
Posted by Tim Lambert at 10:40 PM • • 0 TrackBacks
