Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
May 26, 2003
Also in the Fox News article we have: But Lott counters that the number of gun accidents among law-abiding citizens is remarkably low given that about 90 million Americans own firearms.
As I explained earlier, Lott's estimate of the number of firearm owners is much too high…
May 26, 2003
Jan Haugland writes about how blogs have been bad news for people named Lott: Even if Lott is not an outright fraud (which the evidence so far suggests he is), he is certainly not a scholar, and he is a using unethical methods and sloppy research.
Also commenting on blogs and Lott are…
May 26, 2003
I found a copy of the Fresno Bee story that Lott claimed"included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents' bedroom, got out their handgun---and was unable to use it because of the…
May 24, 2003
Dr Limerick thinks Lott isn't washed up, because the AEI and similar institutions will always have a place for him.
Andrew Chamberlain tells us why character matters: By Lott's total disregard for norms of honesty, he's revealed a deep character flaw that runs to his core. And people always…
May 23, 2003
Tom Spencer finds Lott's complaints about a "pattern of deceit" at theNew York Times rather hilarious.
May 23, 2003
In chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns, where Lott argues that "safe storage" laws cause increases in violent crime, he quotes from an op-ed: Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot ... Under the new "safe storage" laws being enacted in California and elsewhere,…
May 22, 2003
Lott has written an op-ed where he criticizes the New York Times for a "pattern of deceit".
May 21, 2003
Posts by d-squared and John Quiggin on data mining and Lott reminded me that Lott accused his critics of data mining in a response to Webster: The Black and Nagin paper excludes Florida after they have already excluded the 86 percent of the counties with populations fewer than…
May 20, 2003
Brian Linse writes: The fact that former supporters (and some current supporters like NRO) haven't been outspoken and firm in their denunciations of Lott's irresponsible and unethical behavior is destined to do additional harm to the cause of gun rights.
May 19, 2003
Tom Spencer comments on Lott's attack on Tom Smith. John Quiggin writes about data mining and Lott.
May 19, 2003
Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com describes an AEI event to publicise The Bias Against Guns. Lott repeats his version of the Appalachian Law School shootings, as usual not mentioning that the shooting stopped because the shooter ran out of ammunition and not mentioning that the armed…
May 18, 2003
On pages 36-37 of The Bias Against Guns Lott attacks Tom Smith: A few years ago, while I was doing research at the University of Chicago,I had lunch with Tom Smith, who is the director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). This private organization…
May 18, 2003
Jim Henley is still concerned about the possibility that the BCS figures might be cooked. I still consider this possibility extremely unlikely because it would require some sort of conspiracy between the statisticians (who don't have an interest in crime figures showing some particular result…
May 15, 2003
ArchPundit has a thoughtful analysis of the latest from Reynolds and Lott.
Shorter dsquared: If you use some data to construct a model, then to test it properly you need new data. Lott's approach is a little different. The model that was given greatest prominence in the…
May 15, 2003
Lott has an op-ed in The Plain Dealer where he continues to mislead: My new book, "The Bias Against Guns," examines multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and finds that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent.…
May 14, 2003
Tom Spencer thinks that Reynolds is "making wild evidence-free claims about the nature of other scholarship in the field just to distract you from the trouble his man Lott is in." It is certainly odd that Reynolds doesn't provide any evidence that the research he criticizes is "…
May 14, 2003
In Lott's appearance on KSFO he talked about the Appalachian Law School shooting and described the two armed off-duty police officers who apprehended the shooter as "two students, one with a former law enforcement background". Lott knows full well (as this thread…
May 13, 2003
Glenn Reynolds comments on the CNSNews article. Despite Ayres and Donohue's best efforts, Reynolds is all agnostic on the Lott question, but fortunately he has an opinion on the study by Ludwig and Cook (who Reynolds calls "antigun researchers"): What's most striking to me, though, is…
May 13, 2003
Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com writes a very pro-Lott piece on the dispute between Lott and Ayres and Donohue. Probably the most notable feature is what is not mentioned---there is nothing about the coding errors Lott made. We can be sure that Donohue mentioned the problem to…
May 13, 2003
[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on May 13, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
With some recent attacks on me in a variety of places from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to numerous other…
May 13, 2003
As well as making the highly misleading claim that women are 2.5 times as likely to be injured if they offer no resistance than resisting with a gun as I discussed yesterday, in The Bias Against Guns Lott claims (page 99): Carrying a gun is also the safest course of action when one is…
May 12, 2003
So, apart from pretending to be one, what expertise does Lott have on women and gun issues? Well, he wrote this NRO article on women and guns. It was widely linked by bloggers, who felt that the key statistic was this: "The probability of serious injury from a criminal confrontation is 2.5…
May 9, 2003
The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a directory of pro-gun scholars. It is grouped into sections by specialty. So who are the experts with special expertise in Women and Gun Issues?Women and Gun IssuesDr. John Lott
American Enterprise…
May 8, 2003
Three recent papers that contradict Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" theory:
Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, "The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings" Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp 271-296 (2002). Duwe et al find no statistically significant impact…
May 8, 2003
Brian Linse responds to William Sjostrom's attempt to defend Lott.
May 7, 2003
Mark Kleiman has posted some comments from John Donohue about the Stanford Law Review controversy. Donohue isn't even sure what the changed word was that caused Lott to withdraw his name. (Details are here if you are interested.) And like the rest of us, Donohue is puzzled as to…
May 6, 2003
So what was the one word correction that prompted Lott to remove his name from his paper? In their draft, Ayres and Donohue wrote (my emphasis): On the other hand, the temporal pattern, that states adopting shall-issue laws in the late 1980s did better while those adopting…
May 6, 2003
Julian Sanchez has an article in the May issue of Reason on the role blogs played in the investigation of the Lott affair.