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 about 8,000 gun murders. Yet our best estimates indicate that last year Americans also used guns defensively, a little bit over 2 million times a year. Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.
Surveys that ask about both offensive and defensive uses consistently find more offensive uses than defensive uses. Lott's comparison uses numbers from different surveys that cannot possibly both be true. Lott's brandishing number involves ignoring significantly lower numbers from several larger professionally conducted surveys in favour of an estimate from just seven defensive gun users in his own amateurish survey. And he didn't even calculate the number correctly.
Basically you have about 190,000 words during 2001 on gun crime stories, and zero words being spent on any of those news broadcasts about people using guns to stop a crime or protect themselves or someone else.
Not true, as pointed out earlier. The coverage certainly is lop-sided but is is silly to infer a bias against guns from it, any more than you could infer a bias against aeroplanes because plane crashes get extensive coverage while all the occasions when lives have been saved by air rescues get much less coverage.
at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia, in which several people were killed. There were two students at the school who had law enforcement backgrounds, that when the attack started, they ran to their cars, got their pistols, came back, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun; when he did so, they tackled him and held him until police arrived.Now, if you go and do a Nexis search, which is a computerized news search of news stories around the country, you find in the one week after the attack well over 200 separate stories about the incident. However, only four mention the students having a gun in any way, and only two of those four mention the students actually used their gun to stop the attack. The typical coverage was in the Washington Post, which said, "Students pounced on the gunman and held him until help arrived"; and New York Newsday, that said, "The attacker was restrained by the students." There are others which say, "Students tackled the man while he was still armed."
...
Tracy Bridges, one of these students, told me that he had talked to reporters at over 50 different news organizations
Lott is well aware, since he was involved in an extensive discussion on this matter, that the students didn't just have a law enforcement background but were current police officers. That he is counting the same wire service story printed in many papers over and over again. That stories printed on the first day of coverage didn't mention the gun because the first witnesses that were interviewed didn't even know about it. That most stories printed on the next day were covering the aftermath of the shooting rather than the shooting itself. That Tracy Bridges did not talk to reporters at over 50 different news organizations.
Furthermore, several of the stories made it quite clear that the shooter was out of ammunition, but Lott has not mentioned this in any of his op-eds, talks or his book.
And given the recent troubles with the New York Times, one of the stories that I go through in the book involves a major series of over 20,000 words that the New York Times had on so-called rampage killings. These were killings in a public place, where two or more people were killed. And the Times had claimed that over the last 50 years there were a hundred of these cases; 51 of them had occurred within just the five years from 1995 to 1999. And the New York Times had said we're having this massive explosion of these attacks and that it's imperative that we go and adopt new and stricter gun control laws in order to try to deal with it, even though many of these cases didn't involve guns being used in the attack.You know, there's a sidebar where the Times briefly mentions that the series "does not include every attack." But the omissions are so extremely skewed here that they produce a ninefold increase in attacks between the 1949 and 1994 periods versus the '95 to '99 periods. And I don't know anybody who has looked at this data who would claim that there was this huge increase that seemed to occur right in 1995.
As I detailed earlier, and as is obvious if you read the New York Times article, the Times did not say that there was a "huge increase" or a "massive explosion" in 1995. That's Lott's straw man.
When these [safe storage] laws get passed, you'll see about a 5 to 6 percentage point drop in gun ownership that occurs right when they get passed. And over time, you'll see a huge increase in the rate at which people store their guns locked and unloaded. It goes from about in the low 30 percent range to almost 70 percent within five years after these states pass these laws.
David Hemenway's review points out that Lott's claims here are based on a misuse of GSS data, which is not designed for state level analysis as Lott uses it here. He is also cherry picking which gun ownership survey to use.
I just--I mean, I--since you deal with studying the media, I could actually get some advice from you on that type of thing, because--you know, there's a study that's come out in the Stanford Law Review, that Carl was referring to, that they'd given to the L.A. Times kind of as an exclusive to write up something on. And I remember talking to the reporter, and she said, well, you know, you say this and they say this, how am I supposed to evaluate what's right? And my response to some extent is, look, there may be some things that are more difficult for you to evaluate, you know, like what's the right statistic to use here--your statistical test. But there are lots of things that should be very easy for you to evaluate.So for example, this paper was generally criticizing the work that I'd done in the past, and the first criticism that they brought up is that Lott never mentions the cost of guns. You know, he only mentions the benefits. And then they go through and they say if Lott were, you know, a reasonable researcher he would mention a cost--for example, they have a 1992 case in Louisiana, where a Japanese exchange student was shot when he walked into the wrong back door of a house. And my point--and I went through some other ones, I maybe went through, like, four or five of them. And I said, you know, those are pretty easy things to check. You know, is it true that Lott's work never mentions the cost of guns? And that's simply not true. I mean, from the very first sentence in the books--I would go and point to them--that the first sentence would say a gun can prevent things from happening, it can also make it easier for bad things to happen. Or that, you know, this Japanese exchange student thing was on page 2 of "More Guns, Less Crime"--that very case that they were saying if Lott was reasonable, he would mention something like that.
The only reason why Ayres and Donohue's paper contains that error is that Lott insisted on its restoration to the paper. In an email the editor wrote:
(2) p119 Hattori story ---> Your insistence seems really pointless, because making them restore their original phrase serves no purpose other than giving you the chance to say that they're wrong. I will ask Donohue to restore this one, but please take an objective look at your paper, and I think you will realize that none of your points are affected or diminished by this change.
Lott does not mention that Ayres and Donohue acknowledge the error and correct it in their reply. Nor does he mention that this is the only error that he was able to find in a 120 page paper. Nor does he mention that what they were trying to point out was that Lott and Mustard had erroneously claimed that the Hattori shooting was not "unlawful". Nor has Lott acknowledged or corrected this error, even though they had pointed it out to him before the Lott and Mustard paper was published.
If reporters are looking for some non-technical thing they can check they could compare Lott's claims with what the New York Times article actually said.
Also in the transcript we have Carl Moody saying:
The second cut is, as you say, is the data available to other researchers [inaudible], and the answer is no for Kellermann, so I think he's lying. He's refused repeated requests for his data. So, no, I don't trust him and I don't think anybody here in this room should trust him, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Kellermann's data has been available from the ICPSR (study 6898) for six years now. You would have hoped that Moody would have taken at least a tiny bit of care with his facts before accusing Kellermann of lying. (And why hasn't Moody accused Lott of lying about the 1997 survey---Lott has not released the data from that survey.) Oh, and Lott at least, is well aware that Kellermann has released his data but he did not correct Moody's false statement.