Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
August 7, 2004
John Ray left a rather odd comment to my post about the continuing decrease in violent crime in England. He stated that police figures for gun crimes will be more accurate than survey figures. His statement is probably true (gun crime in England is too rare to be well measured by a survey), but…
August 5, 2004
Wikipedia states:
Godwin's Law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage in Internet culture that was originated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states that:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is a…
August 1, 2004
The latest crime statistics for England and Wales have been released. Sharon Howard has a good round-up of reactions to the statistics:
What's happening here is that the British Crime Survey is suddenly being discounted by Tory politicians because it's showing falling crime levels…
July 29, 2004
The Akron Beacon Journal reports that a trial on whether punch card ballots were constitutional has been delayed. Why? Read on:
ACLU lawyers complained Wednesday that the state's last-minute filing hadn't given them enough time to study the evidence---a report comparing…
July 28, 2004
Some weeks ago Lott wrote this article, where he dismissed concerns about fraudulent electronic voting as "conspiracy theories". As far as I can tell Lott has no expert knowledge about computers, and rather than do any research into the electronic voting machines, he has just invented his…
July 25, 2004
Kellermann's studies on guns frequently get criticized by people who do not seem to have read them. The latest to do so is Michael Krauss, who writes
Notwithstanding all this data, the press gave extraordinary publicity to a 1993 article by one Arthur Kellerman in the New England…
July 24, 2004
Matthew Yglesias and Mark Kleiman have both written about the Assault Weapons Ban. I agree with Yglesias that the ban doesn't make sense since it bans weapons by name rather than by some characteristic that makes them dangerous. I've criticized the ban in Australia on semi-automatic…
July 24, 2004
After a comment spambot left spam on over a hundred of my posts, I've decided to close comments on posts older than 60 days. I had to write a small plugin to do this. Blosxom users can get it here. You'll also need Jason Clark's storystate plugin.
July 18, 2004
[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on April 25, 2005. I have added critical commentary, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
1) Did I Attribute the 98 Percent Brandishing Number to Others? No
Apparently, some credence is being given to the claim…
July 16, 2004
I've been having a discussion with Kevin Baker about his claim that self-defence in the UK is practically illegal. The discussion started when Carl Lindsay was convicted of manslaughter after killing an intruder who was trying to rob him. I wrote:
Pro-gunners such as John Lott,…
July 10, 2004
The cover story in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald is Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan's review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't opening in Australia until July 29, and Sheehan appears not to have seen it. So how does he write the review? Easy---he…
July 8, 2004
Mann, Bradley and Hughes have published some corrections to the supplementary information for the famous hockey stick graph showing the temperature record of the last 1000 years. They say that the errors do not affect their published results. This could explain why McKitrick and…
July 3, 2004
After reviving my first ever online post. I've dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian:
Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the "non-violent peace loving" European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below…
July 2, 2004
Tom Giovenetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation has responded to my story on the Microsoft-funded think tanks attack on open source. It's rather an odd response---he's angry that I dared to suggest that they were funded by Microsoft, but he's not going to…
July 1, 2004
Sadly No gives Lott's latest op-ed the short shrift it deserves.
Update: Hunt Stilwell also writes about the stupidity of Lott's argument.
July 1, 2004
Well, I now have 500 posts here, and only 399 are about Lott. The first post I made to this blog was on Jan 12, 2003, but to confuse things I just put up my first ever Usenet post to make it look as if my blog is older than the web.
July 1, 2004
Lehrer and Lott have recycled their previous cherrypicking exercise into an article in the Investor's Business Daily falsely claiming that gun control in Britain, Canada and Australia have lead to "historic increases in crime". Mostly they repeat their previous claims, so I'll just…
June 29, 2004
In response to criticism that Lott used cherry picked numbers to claim that homicides had increased following gun registration in Canada, "Maxim" posted on Usenet:
The law started in December 1998. Guns did not have to be registered until 2001. Violent crime was falling until very…
June 29, 2004
Mike Adams has an article on John Lott and Michael Moore where he writes:
The thesis of "Bowling for Columbine" is sometimes difficult to ascertain because Moore frequently contradicts himself in the movie. Nonetheless, I think that he is trying, above all else, to assert the following:
The…
June 27, 2004
On his blog, John Lott writes
The Public's Response to Michael Moore's Sources
David Letterman: How do we know what's in your film [Fahrenheit 9/11] is true? Michael Moore: Because I got most of my information from The New York Times. Audience: Wild laughter. Letterman: [Strains to repress…
June 26, 2004
Site Meter says that I have now had 200,000 visits to this blog. The post that attracted the most visits was the one I made a few days ago on think tanks and Open Source, with about 35,000 visits, mainly because of a link from Slashdot. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by.
June 23, 2004
Think tanks vs Open Source
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks:
Date
Think Tank
Author/Title
Extracts
Sep 19, 2002
Competitive Enterprise Institute
James DeLongSoftware Wars: Open Source And…
June 22, 2004
The National Post has printed a letter from Gary Mauser commenting on the Lott/Lehrer oped I discussed earlier. Here is the whole thing:
It should not surprise many people that Canada's gun laws have not worked (More Gun Control Isn't The Answer, John R. Lott Jr., June 15). Anyone living in a…
June 20, 2004
Lott has teamed up with Eli Lehrer for another cherry picking exercise. In an op-ed drafted in National Post they get straight to it with an outrageous cherry pick in just the second sentence:
Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998…
June 18, 2004
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's attack on Linux gets taken apart in Lee Gomes' Wall Street Journal article:
An institute study issued last month ups the ante in Linux criticism. It tries to prove that Linux's Linus Torvalds has always been contemptuous of intellectual-…
June 17, 2004
Jason Soon has a series of posts on gun control in Australia here, here and here.
I felt that the laws here before 1996 were about right and I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea. The 1996 gun buyback involved replacing semi-automatic long guns with ones that weren't semi-autos.…
June 16, 2004
Lott has a new post on blog where he writes:
6/15/04 Two-thirds of Police Chiefs think Right-to-carry Laws Reduce Crime
A new survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police asks members: "Do you agree that a national concealed handgun permit would reduce rates of violent crime as recent…
June 7, 2004
Ken Brown has a reply to the heavy criticism of his paper claiming that Linus Torvalds did not write Linux. ADTI introduce his reply like this:
Experts from Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds agree: a. they are much smarter than AdTI's Kenneth Brown, b. IBM is good, Microsoft is…
June 2, 2004
John Quiggin has a heuristic to help detect outfits like The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute.
ADTI claimed that Ken Brown's attack on Linux was based on "extensive interviews" with "Richard Stallman, Dennis Ritchie, and Andrew Tanenbaum". We already saw Tanenbaum's repudiation of Brown. Now…
June 2, 2004
At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, "agricola", criticized Lott, linking to my blog. Another poster, "fallingblock", responded:
I contacted John Lott a while back and asked him for the details of his…