Keneth Miles describes Lott and Lehrer's claims that crime increased in Washington DC after the gun ban as an excellent example of cherry picking.
Earlier, I observed that the only justification Lott offered for another claim he made about DC crime, that Baghdad had fewer murders was "presumably Rumsfeld knows whether the number of murders is greater or less than 200 a month". Wyeth has found that the Baghdad city morgue handled 470 gunshot deaths in July. For comparison, metropolitan Washington has a similar population to Baghdad and about 20 gunshot murders each month. It would seem that all the AK47s floating around Baghdad haven't reduced crime that much.
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Lott responds on his blog to Wyeth's accusation that he had no evidence for his claim about
In my previous entry on the Baghdad murder rate I noted that pretty well every paper that had reported the Baghdad murder rate had given a vastly higher figure than Lott's number and the only paper out of step w
In July last year, Lott, armed with no evidence at all, claimed that Washington DC had a higher murder rate than Baghdad.