My name is John, and I'm addicted to sockpuppets

You've met Mary Rosh and maximcl and Washingtonian. Now meet Bob H and Tom H and Sam and Kevin H and Too bad Tim is not very accurate and Gregg. Yes, Lott created a whole army of sockpuppets that he uses to post comments on my blog. At first he would use just one sock to make a point or dispute something I wrote. But after a while he would deploy multiple socks in the same thread to back each other up. For example, in this thread where "Too bad Tim is not very accurate", Gregg and Kevin H backed each other up with statements like:

"Too bad Tim is not very accurate" nails lambert.

And this thread where Tom H and Bob supported each other. I told Tom H that he was the only one making a particular claim and he came back with

Tim, you can't even get this right. Bob agreed with me earlier. Please try stopping making things up. Especially when they are so easily checked.

This seems a little dishonest to me.

How do I know that these are all really John Lott? They don't all have the same IP number, but there is a small set of closely related IP numbers. The Comcast and Speakeasy IP addresses are unique to a household, so if these sock puppets are not Lott, they are someone in his family.
"Kevin H" and "Too bad" used the same IP number as Gregg, but this was an AOL cache, so it is conceivable that the match in this case was just a coincidence but this is extremely unlikely since all three were involved in the same thread and all used the same AOL client under MacOS. (Note that the preceeding two sentences have been edited since the original posting to add the information about Comcast and Speakeasy.)
The full list of all his comments is below the fold.

This list was automatically extracted from my comment database using a list of known Lott IP numbers.

17/4/2004 13:57:24 laser
It appears that all laser pointers all laser points above a very low power level (1mW) are indeed banned in parts of Australia (link). That appears to be a very low power level compared to other countries.

Bob H 17/9/2004 15:41:57 morebias2
Has anyone actually looked at the Lott and Hassett paper rather than simply taking Lambert's word for it? While most of the regressions take the change in economic variables over up to a quarter, L&H do try looking at economic data up to six previous reporting periods on page 15. See their paper at link What am I missing?

Bob H 17/9/2004 15:51:55 lottblogroll
Have you looked at the amount of time between these two posts by Kevin Baker. It was months. Is this serious? In the first one Kevin Baker claims that he did not like Lott but Lott does nothing for a long time. Aren't you making a big post hoc ergo propter hoc jump in logic? But from what I can tell that is what you see to be doing all the time.

Bob H 17/9/2004 15:56:19 evoting2
I get it this site is a parody. Correct? As I read Lott's opeds his point appears to be that the electronic machines already have several types of "receipts" in the form of CDs and other types. Isn't his argument that paper adds nothing? Not that backup is not necessary. Correct?

Tom 17/9/2004 17:32:35 burn
I don't get the comparison. In the CBS case, the source lied. In the Levitt case, the source appears to be correct. Despite all the studies and evidence to the contrary, Levitt ONLY cites one side of the debate in the paper you reference on crime in the 1990s and claims that if anything concealed handguns increased crime. Levitt gave a balanced literature review? That seems to me to be selectively citing just the evidence you want to get an anti-gun conclusion. That seems like an agenda to me. As a minor issue, on top of all that, the one paper that he bases his entire conclusion does not appear very convincing.

Tom 17/9/2004 17:39:19 carter
I don't understand this post. Even if the person Lott talked to was Mary Anastasia O'rady, the discussion was about a columnist so I do not see why lambert labels the person a reporter. Does anyone understand the difference between a reporter and a columnist and whether they are supposed to have opinions? This whole discussion is weird and seems nonsensical.

Bob H 19/9/2004 16:19:11 morebias2
If I understand correctly, the issue is picking up trends. My look at your graphs seem to imply that six months into the past plus the current month would give you a pretty good idea of the trend. L&H also have variables for whether there is a recession. Your graph shows trends, but I guess you will have to explain why these variables won't pick up the trend and the general economic conditions enough. It just seems like you are making an assertion that honestly doesn't seem particularly strong. What in your graph indicates that their seven periods plus the recession variable are not enough?

Bob H 19/9/2004 16:26:24 cherrypicking6
I guess that I just don't see the Cherry picking? Lott quotes the only numbers discussed in the article. He also provides a link to it so he wasn't hiding anything. What is the big deal? In addition, his point was that people were forced to defend themselves in risky ways without weapons. I could see that you might disagree with that last point, but it is not what you are complaining about and the rest of you discussion seems irrelevant to that point. What am I missing?

Bob H 20/9/2004 16:18:09 morebias3
Do you understand that Hassett and Lott say that they controlled for the level and if the unemployment rate was going up or down? If they did do that, doesn't that say that your concern does not pan out? As to your claim about how best to do this work, "The correct way to answer this is to go back to the news stories and look at the ones that did not have positive headlines when the unemployment rate went down," that appears to me to be what their regressions really do. They regress the percent positive headlines on the level and change in some economic variable and then some dummy variable for party or president. Therefore when the unemployment rate is falling Hassett and Lott are seeing if there are an unusual number of negative stories and if that unusual number is occurring under different presidencies.

Bob H 20/9/2004 16:26:34 cherrypicking6
I don't see any cherry picking and I have no clue what you mean by " that Lott picked out the increase and did not report the decreases." There was only one number in the article. Lott quoted just that one number. He didn't pick one number over others that would have shown something else. His point in the post was that people were being forced to defend themselves in ways that didn't make sense and that the newspaper didn't note the problems that were being caused for people. If you bothered to quote the last sentence in Lott's post, it would be clear to everyone what the point of Lott's post was. I have to say that the newspaper stories sure seem to confirm that people were reduced to protecting themselves in some pretty silly ways and I suppose that was the point that the newspaper was trying to make. Don't you think that was the point that the newspaper was trying to make? Of course, the newspaper had different advice for people than what Lott was telling peopel to do. Now, again, if you disagree with Lott's advice on how people should behave, that would be a challenge to what he said.

Bob H 21/9/2004 13:56:07 morebias3
To Tim:
I may be missing something, but it sure looks to me that L&H are picking up whether unemployment is going up or down. The change in unemployment would be the difference in the unemployment rate now and what it was last month should pick up the trend. Also, what is a C4.5?

To wcw:

On pages 15 and 16 L&H mention negative binomials and it is my ubderstanding that that is a type of generalized poisson. So I believe that they have done what you say,

Bob H 22/9/2004 07:45:19 cherrypicking6
After your claim that armed robberies have decreased in Australia, I sent Lott a note. He sent me an excel file and some charts of what he claims happened to robbery rates in Australia after the 1996 gun control laws. In response he has also put the figures up on his website at www.johnrlott.com. If these numbers are accurate, it sure looks to me that both robbery and armed robbery rates are higher now than they were in 1996 and also higher than any of the years immediately prior to the law. Even if you pick 1995 to be safely before the law as a comparison, the increases in robbery rates are even a little larger. The figures are actually rather impressive. It appears as if you have been playing fast an loose with your selective cherry picking claims. In addition, it still concerns me that you selectively quoted from Lott's earlier posting on Sidney and left off the last half of his posting. You never responded to that.

Bob H 25/9/2004 00:18:49 morebias3
To dsqaured:
How do you handle a logit or probit approach if there is more than one newspaper story for any given news announcement and if you get some mixture of positive and negative? What if you have some values that are .333, .5, and .6667 for example as they claim? Could you explain how you use the approach you are saying. It would seem that all the estimates used by Hassett and Lott would be fine. What are we missing here?

Bob H 25/9/2004 05:07:10 cherrypicking6
Could you please explain what you mean by "not" going up dramatically. Here are some numbers from the spreadsheet that one can download from Lott's website. Please tell me if these numbers are wrong. Year & Armed Robbery Rate per 100,000 Aussies.

1993 30

1994 28.3
1995 29.1
1996 34.1
1997 48.9
1998 57.9
1999 49.9
2000 49.5
2001 57.9
2002 39.7

I checked Lott's claim and it is right that the average armed robbery rate for the six years from 1997 to 2002 is 74 % higher than in 1995. For 1996 to the average for 1997 to 2002 it is 48% higher. You could look at the pre years average versus the post years average and you would get similar changes. The numbers are flat before the 1996 law. 1998's numbers show a 99 percent rise over 1995 and a 69 % rise over 1996. Even if you pick just the low year for 2002, the increase is still 36%. It seems that I read someplace on your website that you attributed the recent drops to increased policing. If so, you might want to be careful attributing any drop in crime 8 yrs after law to the law.

We are going to have to label you Tim "the cherry picker" Lambert both for your numbers and your selective quotes.

Bob H 26/9/2004 12:20:26 morebias3
To dsquared:
Thanks for your answer. I can see this as a possible approach for the individual newspaper estimates that they look at. If you have two or more articles that come out for the news report, how would you reparameterise the data? Do you really have multiple observations for each news report for each paper? Anything that I can think of that would break it down further would seem to imply that or are you arguing that it either doesn't matter or can be fixed some other way?

Bob H 27/9/2004 04:05:54 cherrypicking6
I) Armed robberies are still not back down to where they were prior to the law. You had a big rise that started just when the law changed. Again, the drops still don't take you down to the pre-law level. Recent drops some six or seven years after the law have been attributed by others, including Tim, to increased policing. II) When I have read Lott's discussions or looked the excel file that he has made available on Australia he has taken averages which seems the opposite of cherry picking and doesn't put the whole weight on one recent year like Tim only does. Tim, if you took the average armed robbery rate after the law and compared it to the rates before the law, Wouldn't any one think that was a big (or large or whatever giant) increase in crime. III) While Tim has cited one part of Lott's 9/12 post out of context, the point of the post was that Aussies are being forced to defend themselves in not very smart ways.

Bob H 29/9/2004 08:38:35 cherrypicking6
First, the law was implemented in 1996. It is hard to see anything going on with armed robberies prior to 1996. Tim has been all over the place on this. Claiming that "Armed robberies have decreased in Australia and in NSW and in Sydney. Lott pulled out that number to make it look there had been an increase." Decreased? Does anyone see a decrease after 1995? Then Tim claims "There was an increase from 1996 to 1998 and since then the rate has returned to the 1996 level." He makes it sound that it briefly went up only in 1997 and 1998 and then went down. Can Tim read his own graphs? Up until 2001 it remained just as high as in 1998. Count 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 20001. That seems like a pretty substantial period.

1993 30
1994 28.3
1995 29.1
1996 34.1
1997 48.9
1998 57.9
1999 49.9
2000 49.5
2001 57.9
2002 39.7
2003 36 (from Tim) Note still much higher than 1995's 29.1

Second, as I read Lott he is actually claiming that the crime rates surely didn't fall as people were predicting. Doesn't that seem beyond debate?

Bob H 30/9/2004 20:54:19 cherrypicking6
Talk about cherry picking. I notice that you drop off the 1993 data, and for good reason. The armed robbery rate in 1995 was even less than that in 1993. Prior to the law being implemented in 1996. The crime rate bounced up and down within a relatively narrow range. 1996 is the first year that there is a big increase. There is then an even bigger increase in 1997. If you think that there is a big increase in 1995, notice that the gap between 1996 and 2003 is still even bigger.

Bob H 30/9/2004 21:01:32 cherrypicking7
Tim "the cherry picker" Lambert is at it again. Note that Lott's piece writes "In fact, while murder rates have varied over time, during the almost 30 years since the ban, the murder rate has only once fallen below what it was in 1976." But Tim forgets to note that after Lott states the increase experienced for the five years immediately after the law, Lott says that it goes up and down after that.

Bob H 30/9/2004 21:34:16 cherrypicking7
Of couse, in addition, Tim fails to note that Lott's website also links to the original data up through 2000 and if he wanted to graph out another year or so for the index crimes beyond the natural stopping point of 1980 Lott could have gotten even bigger increases in index crime. If you look at the link lott gives for the different crime numbers he could have put together very similar graphs for robbery murder and other crimes. I don't understand why Tim believes that property crimes like burglary will not be affected by the gun ban.

Bob H 8/10/2004 16:55:24 razor2
"2. Imagine dividing the US into two equal sized countries. By Michael' measure the efficiency of each piece is half that of the US, even though nothing else has changed. The reason is that Michael' measure does not include international travel at all."

This point by Tim seems nonsensical to me. True the measure for each half is half what it was before, but the total is the same. I don't see the problem at all.

Incidently, is everything one big conspiracy theory to Tim? why do you see Horner, Paul Georgia, and Iain Murray as always having bad motives? The attacks on Pat Michaels show you are obsessive.

Bob H 28/11/2004 08:30:44 lottlancet
This is really weird, Tim. Lott quotes the entire section from the New York Times that you quote, plus he quotes some criticisms by the Times. Your discussion is completely misleading because it makes it appear as if Lott wasn' accurately describing the discussion in the Times. Lott quotes the following:

'hree weeks ago, The Lancet, the British medical journal, released a research team's findings that 100,000 or more civilians had probably died as a result of the war in Iraq. The study, formulated and conducted by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and the College of Medicine at Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, involved a complex process of sampling households across Iraq to compare the numbers and causes of deaths before and after the invasion in March 2003.

'he 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.

'hat database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ''Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.''

't has refrained from commenting on the 100,000 figure, except for noting that such a number ''is on the scale of the death toll from Hiroshima'' and, if accurate, has ''serious implications.'' Certainly, the Johns Hopkins study is rife with assumptions necessitated by the lack of basic census and mortality data in Iraq. The sampling also required numerous adjustments because of wartime dangers -- and courage in carrying out the interviews. Accordingly, the results are presented with a good many qualifications.'

Tom H 10/12/2004 01:26:31 dishonest
Let me get this straight. Kleck didn't do the DMIa or Ohio or Cambridge Surveys and Duncan didn't do the NSPOF survey and these surveys were done many years before the 1995 and 2000 dates listed in the Table. When exactly was the Ohio or DMIa or Cambridge Surveys done? Were they done in 1993 or 1994 or done in the 1970s or 1980s?

Chris Borthwick also apparently misses the point. If you find a result, you want to make sure that it isn't a false positive. If there are biases against that result, that makes the result more believable.

Bob H 20/12/2004 17:36:02 naspanel3
"Misrepresents"? You are really stretching it. The discussion seems clear to me.

28/12/2004 07:37:41 boffo
It seems that the author is having some difficulty remembering the paper because it uses year fixed effects. The claim that "His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness -- and without performing any of the necessary tests -- that the one causes the other." doesn't make much sense with year fixed effects because that simple upward trend would have been picked up with those variables.

Bob H 8/1/2005 07:21:53 lottbellesiles
Some questions

A) If these attacks on Lott from the Bellesiles angle are credible, why did not the National Academy of Sciences mention them? I assumed that if they were mentioned Tim would have pointed to them. From my looking at the report, it appears as if the only thing that the National Academy did was thank Lott for supplying them with all the data that they used and for answering all their questions.

What are we missing here?

B) I don't see any of these carry laws being passed from 1996 to 2001. Five years after the publicity started on Lott's work.

RL 13/1/2005 20:41:00 posse
Lambert is pretty funny. He gets upset when someone says he is engaged in character assasination and Lambert proves it by visiting every single site that mentions Lott's name. Talk about Tim "glaring omissions, misquotations and outright fabrications" Lambert, this gets funnier all the time. Just go to Lott's website and look at his discussions on the Baghdad murder rate, the Appalachian Law School attack, the Merced Pitchfork killings, and others to see some of Lambert's inaccurate statements.

RL 14/1/2005 17:54:00 posse
A) Lott's Los Angeles Times piece and his book The Bias Against Guns gives the names of four people and he mentions that there are others.

B) Why don't you write him about the details on Nagin.

C) Wilson's discussion is not using the term "murder" with that quote. I look at the panel's own regressions and for the ones that Wilson was talking about they show drops in ALL the violent crime rates.

Tom 15/1/2005 10:59:00 posse
Dear Confused Carl:

Lott is referencing two different parts of WIlson's discussion. Lott clearly quotes Wilson as saying: "confirmation of the findings that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate . . . " On the other hand, virtually ever reanalysis of the committee showed that violent crime fell. Only the cases where Wilson objected to them not accounting for other factors did they not find an effect.

You are getting as bad as Lambert in sellectively quoting things.

Tom 15/1/2005 17:26:00 posse

Dear Confused Carl:

Even if you are unable to read what Wilson wrote, possibly you can look at the actual regression tables in Chapter 6 where the panel did its own work. If you leave out the regressions that do not control for other factors that can effect crime (what Wilson was saying wouldn't get published in a refereed journal), the violent crime regression show that VIOLENT CRIME IS FALLING! Not just murder, but rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Look at all the regressions that use the longest period of data up to 2000. Even if you pretend to be dense in reading Wilson and find it necessary to confuse two different paragraphs that he has written, even you can not deny this point.

Tom 17/1/2005 07:58:00 posse
A) One of the two sentences being debated here by Wilson says: "his results survive virtually every reanalysis done by the committee."

B) If you read More Guns, Less Crime, there is a powerful discussion about how the simply dummy approach can be misleading and this appears to be such an example.

Tom 19/1/2005 22:42:00 posse
Are you serious? No matter how you try to stretch things it is obvious that Wilson's argument in that sentence was much broader than just murder. Your discussion of the dummy variable issue is just childish. The discussion and graphs regarding the "Inverted V" argument in his book make it very clear that the simple dummy variable approach can be very misleading. I could quote the passages, but you would try to avoid the issue. Why don't you deal with the substance? If it is a V shape, how can the averages on either side be different? THis is discussed in more depth in his book.

Tom H 5/3/2005 05:11:23 felonvote
I see 173,000 individuals convicted in 2000 of violent felonies. I don't understand Lambert's so-called math ability. If states on average prevent these people from voting for 10 years on average, that means about 1.7 million violent felons are prevented from voting. Violent aggravated assaults (hardly a trivial offense like the drug violations that Lambert emphasizes) make up most of these. With life prohibitions on voting you could get many millions. You just don't compare it for one year. Lambert needs some real help doing simple math.

Tom H 5/3/2005 15:19:29 felonvote
"A bill to guarantee that millions of convicted murderers, rapists and armed robbers can vote." This does not say that those who currently can't vote will be able to do so. What it says is that these criminals will be guaranteed to vote. Guaranteed by the federal law. If there are about 90,000 criminals per year that committed murder, manslaughter, rape, & robbery, then that implies that there are 1.8 million over 20 years. By the way, the year 2000 in Table 6 is a low year for violent crime. Convictions per year would have been much higher in the 1970s, 1980's, 1990s. Thus if anyone cares to go back and look at the numbers, then it would appear Lott&Glassman are quite correct.

Tom H 6/3/2005 01:32:03 felonvote
Brian S., You are mixing two different paragraphs together. One is a reference to what Hillary C. is saying about all people who are currently banned. Another is the number of people who would be "guaranteed" the right to vote no matter what the states try to do in the future, and it involves a subset of the people who commit certain felonies. Face it, Lambert blew it again by only looking at numbers for ONE SINGLE YEAR (a year with a very relatively low crime rate) and ignoring what the word "guarantee" means. Lambert's discussion did even begin to acknowledge that you would want to look at more than one year and that picking a year where the crime rates were half (I assume) what they were in earlier years might be misleading to extrapolate from.

Bob 6/3/2005 18:45:28 felonvote
I probably missing something trivial, but "guarantee" sounds like it protects all felons ability to vote. Guarantee doesn't only sound like change from not vote to vote. There are plenty of other words and phrases that Lott&Glassman could have used if that is what they meant. Also Tom's 20 years seems like a pretty conservative estimate since the guarantee would apply to felons of all ages. While some felons might only live for a few years after release others may live for a long time. I don't know what the number to use is, though 20 seems low.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt (though it does bias the results in your desired direction), but why are you using "Felon Sentences in State Courts" in your most recent post and not all felons. Are you claiming that those convicted of federal felonies are able to vote in states? Is that true?

My reading of the earlier posts says that if you place felony manslaughter with murder or believe that they are referring to violent felons generally Lott&Glassman have way more numbers than needed to make their claim.

Bob 7/3/2005 12:51:48 felonvote
"Pro bono" wrote: "While Bob and Tom H venture into what-the-meaning-of-"is"-is territory (and lying about that too - manslaughter is already part of <1% murders, Bob, and yes, felons do vote in most states), this is all quite irrelevant." The claim is that there is an inaccuracy and the only way that claim can be made is misinterpreting the word "guarantee." I don't read anyone explaining "guarantee" doesn't mean exactly what is consistent with the meaning that make Lott&Glassman's statement correct (that is the law will ensure that these criminals can vote in the future).

The claim that "Lott and Glassman deliberately leave the reader" is strange because it requires that readers not realize that there are two separate sentences in two separate paragraphs together. It also means that the readers won't know that there are other felonies besides murder, rape and robbery. If they know that, no one will be mislead.

As to misleading people, what about Tim only originally reporting one year of crime numbers to make his claim and no one but Tom on this section pointing out that you had to add it up over many years.

Tim, you have Lott on the brain. Here you have two co-authors and you have to write that "Lott made the claim."

Too bad Tim is not very accurate 7/3/2005 15:27:44 dgucoverage
Questions

Lott's book mentions the Santee, California case.

It just takes a few minutes to go through Lott's website to see the inaccuracies in this post.
Even the Washingon Post gets the Appalachian Law School case correct, but see Posts on the Appalachian Law School Attack. He has interviews with several of the students who stopped this attack, and it appears that these students were former deputy sheriffs from another state. Does Lambert claim that the students got their job status wrong?

Lott's site says that the difference between the Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody and Landes and Lott research is on account of they looked only at 4 or more deaths and that the sample was very small and Landes and lott got significant results for 2 or more or 3 or more. This is discussion of replication is not very accurate.

Kevin H 7/3/2005 18:38:00 geekwith45
Lambert, the stalker, can't even get the events right about whether the criminals were leaving the scene of the crime. Edinboro PA involved someone nearby stopping the attacker as he was reloading his gun. Pearl MS involved the killer being stopped as he was headed to the middle school down the street. The Appalachian Law School attack did not involve the attacker leaving the scene at all. Read all the posts on Lott's website on just the Appalachian law school case. He as all the articles up there for anyone who wants to examine them.

The rest of the claims that Lambert makes are just as bogus.

Too bad Tim is not very accurate 8/3/2005 02:25:50 dgucoverage
Well, if you read Lott's book, you would know that he specifically discusses that the Santee person who stopped the killer was an off-duty officer. His book also indicates that you are wrong about your claim that these bad guys were leaving the scene (though I am not sure why that matters). The book indicates that the Edinboro bad guy was reloading his gun. In Pearl, the bad guy was going to the middle school down the street. I have read through the articles on lott's site and I can't see anything obvious that makes it clear that Odighizuwa was going to leave the law school. You are just making these things up. It is not worth going through the other inaccurate claim you make.

Tom H 8/3/2005 13:33:15 felonvote
Pro bono, I hate to tell you this, but the percentages don't tell you anything by themselves about the Number of felons who can't vote. Either Tim is ignorant or dishonest or both. Your defense that you can some how figure out the total number of people who are felons without "summing felonies over the years" (or more accurately the number of convicted felons) is not serious math. In addition, the inability to define a simple word like guarantee properly is amazing. Even more disappointing, though not surprising any longer, is Tim's complete inability to admit a mistake like this.

Gregg 8/3/2005 13:51:55 dgucoverage
"Too bad Tim is not very accurate" nails lambert. I have been going through the links on Lott's website, and if there is some evidence that the killer was leaving the Edinboro shooting or the Appalachian Law School. I have yet to see it. The killer was leaving the Pearl, Mississippi school, but get this Tim forgets to mention that the killer was going to the middle school. Gee, I guess that is the same as saying the killer was leaving the scene.

On the survey question, isn't it obvious to everyone that Lott was talking about the average and if Lott's two surveys are removed from the sample that will not change the answer for a simple reason: Lott's surveys were getting numbers close to the average. So what is the point of all this?

Gregg 9/3/2005 00:31:01 dgucoverage
Ian, good try. Violent crime soared for the six years after the gun regulations, and that is after a long downward trend. Law goes into effect, violent crime is dramatically higher for six years, violent crime is then similar to what it was before the law after other changes are made regarding things like police. Boy the gun law sure did work.

See the charts on Australia's crime rates at 9/21/04.

Tom H 9/3/2005 06:39:08 felonvote
GIve me a break. In order to make this claim you have to ignore the fact that Lott&Glassman were making two different points in two different sentences in two different paragraphs. One is that all felons would be guaranteed the right to vote. The other is those felons who were currently prevented from voting. The 4.7 million only applies to the later, not the former which is where all your analysis was being applied.

Gregg 9/3/2005 14:26:23 dgucoverage
Ian, Lott's website gives out all the data that is at the Australian Institute of Criminology website. Compare the excel file available on Lott's website at 9/21/04 with Table 1a on page 5 from the AIC. They are identical, sorry. His figures are exactly right. The problem with you picking and choosing the dates to compare is that the gun control laws went into action in 1996 and the robbery rates are still much higher in 2002 than 1996, though they have finally gone down below the rate in 1997. Lott's numbers show that sexual assault and assault rates are still higher in 2002 than in either 1996 and 1997.

Robbery
Year Number rate

1996 16372 89.4

1997 21605 115

1998 23801 127.1

1999 22606 119.4

2000 23336 121.8

2001 26591 137

2002 20961 106.4

Lott has all the numbers and rates for all the crimes on his website. Every crime. The problem with your and Lambert's lies is that they are easily checkable for anyone who takes the time to go to Lott's website.

Kevin H 9/3/2005 14:51:52 dgucoverage
Tim, making all this stuff up must take some time.

1) Lott hasn't claimed that the off-duty police officer did it all by himself. "An off-duty police officer, who was registering his daughter for classes, helped stopped a public-school shooting at Santana High School in Santee, California in 2001."

or

"An off-duty police officer used his gun to help end an attack at a Santee, California school."

2) Lott has a piece in the Pittsburgh, PA newspaper right near by where the Edinboro, PA attack occurred.

3) Go through all the stories that Lott has on his website. Go through the interviews that he did with the different students who were there. There are disagreements over whether the killer was out of ammo, though there is no question that he still had ammo in his car and there is no disagreement that people knew about it. Let's just call it for you despite the disagreements, how would the students have stopped him from getting to the additional ammo in the car if they hadn't had guns?

4) Pearl, Mississippi: Woodham knew cops would arrive before too long, so he was all business, no play. No talk of Jesus, just shooting and reloading, shooting and reloading. He shot until he heard sirens, and then ran to his car. His plan, authorities subsequently learned, was to drive to nearby Pearl Junior High School and shoot more kids before police could show up.

Tom H 9/3/2005 15:20:04 felonvote
Tim, you can't even get this right. Bob agreed with me earlier. Please try stopping making things up. Especially when they are so easily checked.

Sam 11/3/2005 21:09:43 felonvote
Wow, these are strong responses Tim and "Dominion." You don't have an intellectual argument to respond to Tom so you start this silly stuff. Add me to one person who agrees with him.

Tom H 11/5/2005 11:17:02 economist123
I don't think that this is a very honest discussion. Tim writes: "Don' use the same Amazon account to post another review and sign your name to it." He makes it sound as if the reviewer just signed the review, but the problem is that he edits out the beginning of the review which makes it very clear that the person who provided the review was just pasting in the review what looks like a letter in the Wall Street Journal. It was easy to follow the links. If someone just puts in someone else's letter that is not the same thing as a person signing the review. This editing comes across as being very dishonest.

Tom H 11/5/2005 14:24:09 economist123
Why did Tim say the reviewer had signed the review when he knew it was a Wall Street Journal letter? He should not have cut out the beginning of the review that made that obvious. That was very dishonest. He makes up one claim that is easily seen to be false. He must believe that no one will check the post. Now he makes yet another equally false claim in the same discussion about personal information that is not there.