Biased reporting from CNSNews

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 Johnson, but Lott had nothing to say on the matter and Johnson chose not to mention it. [Update: I checked with Donohue and he told me that he didn't get to mentioning the coding errors. My mistake. It is still true that Lott did not use this chance to dispute the allegation of coding errors.]

Anyway, Johnson writes:

The pair [Ayres and Donohue] examined monthly, rather than annual, crime data and operated under the assumption that - if passage of concealed carry laws truly reduced crime - there would be a "straight line drop" in crime rates from the date of enactment forward. When the crime rate dropped slower than this assumption predicted it should, Donohue and Ayres referred to the difference as an "increase" in crime.

This is wrong from beginning to end. Firstly, they do examine annual data. Secondly, they considered and reported dozens of different specifications, only one of which was the "straight line drop". Thirdly, a slower than expected drop would just make the "straight line drop" smaller, it would not show up as an increase.

"It's only when they use this kind of 'artificial specification' that simplifies this do they get a bad result," Lott explained. "A better way of doing it is by looking at the crime rates year by year, for one year after the law, two years, three years - and when you do that, even their own results get an immediate drop that continues to fall after that."

This is just another variation of Lott's claim that "Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results." This is completely untrue, as I explained earlier. Lott is pulling one graph out of the middle of their paper and pretending that this graph is all of their results.

Donohue and Ayres also use varying definitions of "crime" in their analysis of Lott's research.

"Lott claimed that the 10 states that enacted shall-issue laws between 1985 and 1991 experienced declines in murder and other violent crimes relative to the crime trends observed in other states that did not pass shall-issue laws," Donohue wrote in a press release promoting the book. "In contrast, Donohue contends that the 13 states that enacted shall-issue laws after 1992 experienced relative increases in crime." [Emphases added.]

Ayres and Donohue do not change their definition of "crime". It is perfectly obvious if you look at any of their tables that they considered each of the UCR crime categories separately, as well as the aggregate categories of violent crime and property crime.

But Lott never argued that all crime was reduced by passage of concealed carry laws, only violent crime.

"That's the finding that people have seen all along," Lott told CNSNews.com. "You have some people who were engaging in robbery in order to get money previously and, when people are able to carry concealed handguns to protect themselves, you have some criminals [who] stop committing crimes, but some switch into other crimes."

Most often, Lott said, that switch is from robbery, where criminals come into direct contact with their victims and face a newfound risk of getting shot, to burglary and property theft "because it's relatively less risky."

Ayres and Donohue's most general results (shown in table 13 of their paper) show increases in robbery in more states than decreases.

Those crimes are possibly committed with greater frequency because they are also less lucrative than robbery, explaining the increase in overall crime committed while experiencing a decrease in violent crime.

Except that there was an increase in violent crime.

"I think the thing to do is just put it in context of all the other people who have looked at [my work]," Lott said. "Nobody has found a bad effect except for this one section of [Donohue and Ayres'] paper, and even then, it's just a temporary one.

"Everybody, including this paper, finds that the crime rate falls the longer the laws are in effect," he continued. "I think that's pretty strong evidence."

This is also not true. Lott is pulling one graph out of Ayres and Donohue's 120 page paper and pretending that that one graph is the whole paper.

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