Iraqi guns and crime

Lott has an editorial arguing that the US army would be better off if it didn't disarm Iraqi civilians. Kathy Kinsley agrees. What is notable about his piece is what he doesn't cite. In arguing that American soldiers would be better off if more Iraqi civilians had guns he doesn't cite his own research on concealed carry. This is quite possibly because while he won't admit to making the coding errors, he knows that when they are corrected his results go away.

Instead he cites Mustard's paper that found a correlation between concealed carry laws and reduced police deaths. Unfortunately for Lott, the model Mustard used is similar to Lott's and suffers from the the same flaw of lumping all the states together. Most likely if Mustard's model is disaggregated or extended to include the latest crime figures the results will go away, just as they did with Lott.

Lott also claims:

The states that polls show as having the biggest increases in gun ownership are also the ones that have experienced the biggest relative drops in violent crime.

This is not correct---his analysis used data from polls that were totally unsuited for his purpose and contradicted by all other polls including those he used in subsequent research. More details are here.

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