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Tim Lambert

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January 13, 2003
John Lott has emailed Jim Henley with another response to Lindgren's report. I'll comment on this below. Julian Sanchez also got the Lott email. I didn't. Comments from Jesse Walker at reason.com, skippy, Guy Cabot, Kevin Drum and Steve Verdon. Brief mentions by Iain Murray, Charles…
January 13, 2003
Lindgren has updated his report. Main changes are the inclusion of a reply from John Lott and a dissection of Lott's new "Did I say three months? I meant one month. Yeah, that's the ticket!" claim. Lots more people have blogged on this: Glenn Reynolds, Pejman Yousefzadeh, skippy,…
January 12, 2003
After discussion has simmered along via email, Usenet and mailing list, Marie Gryphon has posted a nice summary on her blog. Several blogs have picked up on this: Julian Sanchez, Jim Henley, Jane Galt, Kevin Drum and Thomas M. Spencer. Clayton Cramer has posted a letter from John Lott on his…
January 8, 2003
Lott's Table 3a from "Confirming More Guns, Less Crime"
October 23, 2002
Joyce Lee Malcolm has an article in Reason online entitled Gun Control's Twisted Outcome. In that article she claims"And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled." and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control.…
October 22, 2002
Joyce Lee Malcolm's article in Reason online ishere In that article she claims that "And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled." and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control. It took me less than five minutes to find the…
October 17, 2002
compiled by Otis Dudley Duncan and Tim Lambert revised 23 Oct 2005 by Tim Lambert Note: With the exception of academic publications, some tapes and some found by LexisNexis search, these were found on the Internet. The web is, of course, not perfectly reliable, and items appearing there…
October 17, 2002
Lott's reply to Duncan's article raises some disturbing questions about Lott's honesty. See also James Lindgren's report on his attempt to find some evidence that Lott actually conducted a DGU survey. Where did that 98 percent come from? 98 percent claims before 1997 Way back in 1993 in…
October 6, 2002
[On Oct 7 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] However, that isn't what I was referring to when I wrote "mathematically impossible". Lott often goes on to claim that 3/4 of the times the DG User fires the shots are warning shots, that only 0.5% of DG uses involve a…
October 2, 2002
[On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Glenn Reynolds writes: I agree that Mr. Lambert's "payback for Bellesiles" angle is pretty obvious. Your allegation is false. I also note that Lott isn't accused of publishing fraudulent scholarship, but rather of making public statements…
October 2, 2002
[On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Norman Heath writes: Tim Lambert asked for suggestions as to how John Lott might have formed a belief about the proportion of DGUs that involve gunfire, prior to having conducted a survery. I took this to mean that Lambert was open to those…
September 26, 2002
[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Norman Heath writes: Just a suggestion, but perhaps Lott simply made a rough comparison between the number of claimed DGUs and the total number of shootings. I.e. if total shootings is (making this up) 120,000 and we subtract 35,000 suicides,…
September 26, 2002
[On Sep 27 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] Peter Boucher, replying to this post, writes: I don't have a copy of Point Blank handy, but I seem to recall the 98% figure either explicitly in the text of that book, or directly derivable from the figures in…
September 24, 2002
[On Sep 25 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] I have replies to queries about Lott's survey from Tom Smith and Al Alschuler. Neither had heard anything about it. Other than Kleck, Tom Smith would be the logical person to discuss the survey design…
September 19, 2002
[On Sep 20 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] James Lindgren writes: After my post to this list saying that "a big national study doesn't just disappear without a trace" because a computer crashes, John Lott called me and told me a long story about how the study was…
September 17, 2002
[On Sep 18 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.] Some more information about DGU surveying from a Kleck email: "We got 4,977 completions over 3 months, using an average of about 10 callers per day (and I believe all of them were FSU students)" Also, look at the…
September 16, 2002
[On Sep 17 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] I've had replies to my queries about Lott's survey from David Mustard and Gary Kleck. Mustard said that he was not involved with the survey. All he was able to say was what he had been told by Lott: that Lott had conducted the survey in 1997…
September 14, 2002
[On Sep 15 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] In response to my appeal for any information about this survey Lott claims to have carried out in 1997 I received this email from Geoffrey Huck. Unfortunately, as you can see, he was not able to provide any support for the existence of the…
September 13, 2002
[On Sep 14 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof. I also emailed it to John Lott. ] Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote: The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave abruptly…
August 31, 2002
Eugene Volokh writes: Martin Killias's "International Correlations Between Gun Ownership and Rates of Homicide and Suicide," 148 Can. Med. Assoc. J. 1721, 1723-24 (1993), purported to show that "the proportions and the rates of homicide and suicide committed with a gun as well as the overall rates…
August 9, 2002
Paul Blackman writes: I'm not sure Kates actually prevents anyone from learning anything. He presents something with a clear bias, but he no more prevents anything than does Tim's commentary. Kates claims that he is trying "to place Malcolm's contribution in the context of extant social…
August 9, 2002
My comments on this article by Don Kates. Mr Kates does readers of the History News Network a grave disservice with his article. He pretends to provide them a criminologist's perspective on the guns-crime question, but only quotes from pro-gun criminologists. He carefully selects the evidence he…
July 22, 2002
In the Tennessee Law Review (v61 513-596 1994) Kates et al wrote: the inventive Dr. Diane Schetky, and two equally inventive CDC writers Gordon Smith and Henry Falk in a separate article actually do provide purportedly supporting citations for the claim that "[h]andguns account for only 20% of the…
May 30, 2002
Joseph Olson writes: Ask any gun dealer about women buying handguns for self protection. A dealer friend tells me that over =BD of his handgun purschasers are women but also tells me that most of them are very concerned that NO ONE will know that they have a gun. It's his opinion, after talking…
May 21, 2002
Eugene Volokh writes: FYI, thought I'd mention that I have a couple of fairly detailed items today about handgun bans, substitution effects, enforcement need slippery slopes, rhetoric, and Mary McGrory (of the Washington Post). Seehere andhere. You argue that long guns are "much more lethal"…
February 24, 2002
Lowell Savage writes: Sorry, Ron. Much as I agree with your position, I have to say that you haven't addressed Tim's issue: why is it that 37% of non-gun defenders were injured before they began self-defensive actions while only 13% of gun defenders were injured before they began self-defense…
February 20, 2002
In "Point Blank", Kleck analyzed NCVS data and found that while 38% of people who used any means of self-protection against robbers were injured in the encounter, only 17% (the lowest for any means for self-protection) of people who use a gun for self-defence against robbers were injured. Kleck…
October 8, 2001
Mary Rosh writes: If you want a good study that doesn't cherry pick data the way Lambert likes to do, The cherry-picking is Shawn's. How come you're not objecting to his Vermont vs DC comparison? read the study by Jeff Miron entitled "Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis" Miron's…
July 27, 2001
by Steven D. Levitt, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago [Editor's note: A version of this piece was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on July 28, 2001 under the title "Pools more dangerous than guns." ] What's more dangerous: a swimming pool or a gun? When it comes to children, there…
June 1, 2001
Since Kellermann had released his data when that paragraph was written, the part I left out was irrelevant. David Friedman writes: From your point of view, what is the story about his data? The story I thought I had seen was that he refused to release it until forced to do so--my vague memory was…