Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
August 3, 2003
Brad Delong points us to a New York Times profile on "rabidly anti-gun" Steven Levitt. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part is especially interesting to me:
The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old…
August 1, 2003
The Washington Times has a story about a Lott related Internet impersonation, but it's not about Mary Rosh. The Washington Times considers the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org to be a more important story than Mary Rosh. That site contains answers like this: Q: I want to get…
July 28, 2003
John Lott informs us about askjohnlott.org but warns us that it is not run by him and is "trying to create a negative impression".
July 26, 2003
Lott responds on his blog to Wyeth's accusation that he had no evidence for his claim about Baghdad murders. (My earlier comments are here.)
Notice that Lott responds on a minor point, once again ducking the question of the coding errors. And while he links to Wyeth and responds to…
July 25, 2003
Vladimir Kushnir describes how Symantec's censorware blocks access to many pro-gun websites such as nra.org, under the category 'Weapons'. I checked, and he has accurately described which sites are blocked. (Though the Lott site that is blocked is actually a collection of…
July 24, 2003
Paul Bruno writes: John Lott should be below anybody's standards, but since Lew Rockwell insists on publishing Lott's work, I cannot in good conscience keep the link to his site.
Roger Ailes is rather unfair to Lott, implying that Lott would deny guns to sixth graders.…
July 23, 2003
Chris Lawrence defends Lott against the charge Wyeth made yesterday. James Joyner also comments.
Lawrence is correct when he points out that Lott's claims about Baghdad murders are not lies unless Lott knows them to be false, and, in the absence of reliable data we don't know…
July 22, 2003
Tom Spencer finds Lott's misrepresentation of Duwe et al hilarious.
The Wyeth Wire takes Lott to task for his completely unsupported claim that Baghdad has fewer murders than Washington DC. Of course, Lott's defence will be that he was just reporting Donald Rumsfeld's…
July 21, 2003
Last week I commented on Lott's LA Times editorial where he claimed thatExamining all the multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 shows that on average, states that adopt right-to-carry laws experience a 60% drop in the rates at which the attacks…
July 18, 2003
On July 12 The Columbus Dispatch published a letter from Paul van Doorn replying to an earlier letter from David Mayer that I commented on. Here is an extract (hyperlinks added by me): Mayer claimed the research of economist John Lott establishes that "violent-crime rates fall after right-to-…
July 15, 2003
Lott has an op-ed in the Kansas City Star which is recycled from a previous op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch that I commented on here. He has made an interesting change---in earlier versions he wrote: Other research, by David Olson at Loyola University and Michael Maltz at the University…
July 12, 2003
A reader reminds me of another problem with Lott's attack on UN gun control efforts that I discussed yesterday. Lott argues that the UN's regulations would prevent people from obtaining small arms to resist totalitarian regimes. This is rather undercut by the Iraqi experience. Tim Noah observes…
July 11, 2003
This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon
and at Barnes and Noble.
Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books.
When you post a review at…
July 11, 2003
I've switched from hand-crafted html to using Blosxom for my blog. This lets me add some nice features like grouping postings by topic, an RSS feed, comments, search and so on.
After a couple of hundred postings about John Lott, I also feel like posting on something else for a change,…
July 10, 2003
In response to my comments about Potemra's review of The Bias Against Guns, Paul Blackman points out that Lott actually mentions the Second Amendment twice in his book. I've corrected my earlier posting to say "barely even mentions" instead of "never mentions".
The first mention is when Lott…
July 10, 2003
In footnote 40 of his article The Impact of Concealed-Carry Laws (in Evaluating Gun Policy), John Donohue comments on Lott's claims about multiple-victim public shootings: In the wake of a recent school shooting in Germany that killed 14, Lott summarized his finding from the Lott and Landes…
July 8, 2003
In the July 14 issue of National Review Michael Potemra has a review of The Bias Against Guns. He writes:Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me---as for many others---it's the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most…
July 6, 2003
skippy isn't impressed by Lott's sleight of hand in proving he had a disk crash instead of offering evidence that he did a survey. skippy is rightly skeptical about the existence of witnesses to the disk crash. There are none. However, we do have plenty of evidence that Lott lost…
July 6, 2003
Lott was on MSNBC's Buchanan & Press on May 26. From the transcript:
PRESS:
After that book came out, there was a person who showed up on the Internet by the name of Mary Rosh, who said you were the best professor she ever had in college. She praised the book in her review on the Internet.…
July 3, 2003
Science has printed a letter from Lott (subscription required) responding to Science's editorial suggesting that the AEI should deal with Lott the same way that Emory dealt with Bellesiles: Donald Kennedy's editorial "Research fraud and public policy" (18 April, p. 393) alleges that I made up a…
July 2, 2003
Jesse Taylor has written a letter to the editor about John Lott and also gives his take on John Lott's suggestion that Iraqi civilians should have more guns. Kaimipono is deeply skeptical. Bill Berkowitz describes it like this: Perhaps the weirdest bit of advice came from John Lott Jr., the now-…
July 2, 2003
A deltoid is the concave triangular curve formed when a small circle rolls around the inside of a circle three times as big. Eric Weisstein's Mathworld has a nice animation as well as a description of its properties.
I use deltoids for the ends of the cartouches in the sidebar…
June 30, 2003
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 by Kopel and Reynolds got…
June 29, 2003
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 rather than Lott, but I guess Lott's is so used to being attacked that he…
June 26, 2003
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.
June 25, 2003
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 better off if more Iraqi civilians had guns he doesn't cite his…
June 23, 2003
Cypren criticizes Fox News for presenting this Lott op-ed as if it were a news story.
June 22, 2003
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 have made their attack on…