Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
June 19, 2003
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 not mention the defender'…
June 18, 2003
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 his gun and a clip on a light…
June 17, 2003
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 to his car to get more when he was confronted by…
June 16, 2003
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 that journal are indeed refereed, their piece was a…
June 15, 2003
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 that accidental gun deaths…
June 13, 2003
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 propensity of gun-control advocates to play…
June 13, 2003
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 brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack…
June 11, 2003
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 examine Lott's claims and see how many…
June 10, 2003
I asked Ben Horwich, the president of volume 55 of the Stanford Law Review to comment on Lott's latest complaints. He writes:
I did not categorically promise Lott that we'd run a verbatim statement by Plassmann and Whitley. I did express my interest in working with them to clear up the…
June 9, 2003
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 and Donohue, we have: Of course, this is nothing new with…
June 8, 2003
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 it was the product of coding errors made by Lott…
June 8, 2003
Tom Spencer thinks that the latest information on David Gross might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
June 7, 2003
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.
I'll post more on Lott's comments later, but for now I want to point to the most…
June 6, 2003
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 "most…
June 5, 2003
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 Martin's imprisonment is "preposterous". Glenn…
June 5, 2003
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 National Academy of Sciences panel examining the plausibility of…
June 5, 2003
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 a former board member of the National Rifle Association…
June 3, 2003
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 defensive gun uses?"
The problem with the survey from the Bureau of…
June 2, 2003
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 were committed with guns. Of those, there were…
June 1, 2003
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 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.
Lott's two…
May 31, 2003
In his interview in the Illinois Leader Lott says:"If you look at the national news reports for ABC, NBC and CBS during 2001, they had about 190,000 words of contemporaneous gun crimes stories on their television morning and evening news reports. The average story is only 250 words or…
May 30, 2003
Several people have commented on the irony of Lott attacking the New York Times for a "Pattern of Deceit", but let's look at what he says in his article: As an example, take the major 20,000 word series on "rampage killings" the Times published during 2000.
The paper declared that…
May 30, 2003
In Lott's latest entry he has given up trying to support his claim that "the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight."
and responded to this post, where I pointed out that Cummings et al clearly stated that they controlled for national…
May 30, 2003
David Glenn's article on academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education mentions the role of blogs in the investigation of Lott's conduct.
William Sjostrom writes "Lott always releases his data." But Lott has not released the data for his 1997 survey.
May 29, 2003
Lott has blogged for the third time about the Merced murders: Taken together, the different articles in these various posts indicate that the gun was locked; it was placed in a way that was not accessible by the children; both the father and the great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton,…
May 28, 2003
Tom Spencer mentions the Washington Post's criticism of Lott. ArchPundit finds Lott's criticism (in this interview)of poorly done gun control research ironic. Arie discovers the John Lott story.
May 28, 2003
Lott has a new entry on his blog where he posts a transcript from Fox News that apparently has the father of the murdered children saying: "If a gun would have been here today, I'd have at least a daughter alive."
I was mistaken when I suggested that the quote was a fabrication.…
May 27, 2003
The Washington Post zings Lott for throwing stones at the New York Times from his glass house. Matt Welch also comments, while Greg Beato thinks that the New York Times has hit rock bottom when even John Lott is denigrating its integrity.
Andrew Chamberlain invites readers to join in an…
May 27, 2003
The Fox News story that Lott cites contains some other falsehoods: For several years, gun control advocates have been quoting a study that reached a very different conclusion. University of Washington doctors claimed that in a dozen states which had safe storage laws, 39 children's lives were saved…
May 27, 2003
Lott has started a blog and responded to the questions I raised about his claims about the Merced pitchfork murders: Fox News interviewed the father of the dead children and reported the following:"Lott cited a Merced, Calif. family whose guns were put away because of the state's safe…