tlambert | September 6, 2003Everyone has something about Lott's latest untruth that I mentioned yesterday. Mark Kleiman says Isn't there anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute with a modicum of institutional self-respect?
Brad Delong replies: If they had any institutional self-respect, why would they keep James "Dow 36,000" Glassman and Kevin "We're Not Joking: Dow 36,000 by 2003" Hassett? Why would they keep Charles "I Don't Know What a Correlation Is" Murray? It's not just John "I've Taken My Own Courses, and I Can Report I'm Really a Great Teacher" Lott.…
tlambert | September 5, 2003 Kevin Drum points out that a correction that Lott requested in response to this Washington Post item implies that Lott did not use "Mary Rosh" in emails when, in fact, Lott did. Drum thinks Lott is lying, which is certainly quite possible, but since there were hundreds of Rosh Usenet postings and only a few emails, it also possible that he just forgot about the emails. Colour me pedantic, but I wish Lott would quit referring to Usenet as an "Internet chat room". Unlike Usenet, "chat rooms" have real-time discussions.
tlambert | September 5, 2003 Jeff Soyer has a post where he is taken in by a Lott opinion piece. He quotes Lott:
In a new book, The Bias Against Guns, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and I examine multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and find that when states passed right-to-carry laws, these attacks fell by 60 percent. Deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.
Exactly. I know there has been some minor controversy about his statistics of late but even if we cut in-half his pro-gun figures, it…
tlambert | September 4, 2003 Tom Spencer, commenting on Duncan's comments that I posted yesterday, writes: Unfortunately folks, as you well know, the damage is already done. We've got right-to-carry laws in the vast majority of states (mine being one of the notable exceptions of course) and there's not much we can do about it at this point.
Meanwhile, Eric Rasmussen commenting on John Donohue's "The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis" is more sceptical---he'd like to see more evidence that Lott's work actually influenced the politicians who passed…
tlambert | September 3, 2003 John Quiggin points to an interesting compilation of fake Internet identities.
Tbogg is surprised that there are still media organizations that take Lott seriously. He also wonders where Lott got his numbers from. Well, the defensive gun use numbers come from this survey Lott says he did, while the statistic about public school shootings was manufactured by selective quoting from news stories.
tlambert | September 2, 2003Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me some comments on the attempts by pro-gun folks to dismiss criticism of Lott as some sort of payback for Bellesiles:
I have gone out of my way to remark that the Bellesiles case is not helpful for evaluating Lott's work. My statement is in section 4 of the essay on Lott and surveys on your site.
Moreover, while I may have heard rumors about Bellesiles' writing earlier, I am willing to testify under oath that the first thing of his I read was his article in Guns in America: A Reader, ed. by Jan E. Dizard et al. (1999). This was after my considerable…
tlambert | September 1, 2003 Lott has a posting responding to my comments on his claims that the news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law was biased. I wrote:Unfortunately, Lott's counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version of what happened deliberately omits important facts and omits contradictory accounts from other eye witnesses and his version contains details that appear to have been invented by Lott.
Lott has no answer at all to almost all of this, so he just responds to part of the criticism…
tlambert | September 1, 2003 After Lott claimed that biased news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law deliberately omitted a defensive gun use, I did my own analysis of the news stories and found that the alleged bias was the product of Lott's flawed counting methodology. Lott has posted a spreadsheet listing 295 articles he found on Nexis, and a file containing 249 of those articles. Some of those articles he does not count because they are duplicates. He asserts that the coverage was biased because only 3 out 218 stories mentioned that the attack was stopped…
tlambert | August 29, 2003 In his book The Seven Myths of Gun Control, Richard Poe has an extensive account of the murders. He is much more careful with his facts than the other pro-gun writers who hang an attack on safe storage laws on the tragedy. He interviewed the mother of the victims and contradicts claims claims by Suprynowicz and Lott that"the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight."
According to Poe, the gun was not locked, but stored unloaded on a high shelf. And she did not run to where the gun was stored. The killer…
tlambert | August 28, 2003 In Lott's 8/20 blog entry he writes:There is a pretty obvious reason why these guys have choosen to publish their work in nonrefereed publications. Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue's own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant evidence that violent crimes increase (for a brief discussion see point 2 here). Even most of their own results show that violent crime rates decline after right-to-carry laws are passed.
And this is his brief discussion:the bottom line is that Ayres and Donohue fail to discuss…
tlambert | August 27, 2003 Tom Wright demonstrates perfectly the misleading nature of Lott's postings on the coding errors: He also claims that the 100's of errors claimed for the study could make a difference without mentioning that these errors were corrected and the study still showed the same results to within thousandths of a percent of the original result. This is like claiming an elephant is a mouse because the claimed multi-ton weight was off by a few grams.
You see, while Lott admits that the "estimates do change somewhat", he does not tell you how much they change.…
tlambert | August 26, 2003 In the posting where he finally admitted that he had made hundreds of coding errors, Lott insinuated that Ayres and Donohue had refused to release their data and that their results were not reproducible.
Unlike Ayres and Donohue, I have endeavored to make the data readily available in a timely manner and to explain how it was constructed.
...
Ayres has also declined my requests for his data in the past, and my attempt to reconstruct what data is publicly available did not produce the same results that he claimed to obtain (e.g., p. 257, fn. 28).
Actually the…
tlambert | August 25, 2003In his statement on the coding errors Lott tries to downplay the significance of the errors:Minor coding errors were discovered in the data set after it was first given out. The files available for downloading on this site have the corrected results using the statistical county level tests employed in Ayres and Donohue's paper ("Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis"). The corrections involved a few thousandths of one percent of the data entries and occurred for observations after 1996. There were well over 70,000 observations and over a hundred variables available in the data…
tlambert | August 19, 2003 Ayres and Donohue have sent a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, replying to Lott's 21 July letter. I agree with their description of Lott's behaviour as dishonest.
On July 21, 2003, researcher John Lott wrote a letter to the editor in which he tried to shore up support for his now discredited theory that state adoption of laws allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns will lower crime. Although he refuses to acknowledge this fact, we showed in a recent article published in the Stanford Law Review that when the coding errors in his own data set are corrected, his own…
tlambert | August 18, 2003 A study by Kovandzic and Marvell has been published in July issue of Criminology and Public Policy. (A draft of their paper is here.) From the journal's news release about their findings:
In the recently published study "Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns: Crime Control through Gun Decontrol?," Kovandzic and Marvell examine what, if any, impact Florida's right-to-carry law has had on its rate of violent crime. They find that the 1987 passage of Florida's RTC law appears to have had no statistically significant effect on violent crime. They proffer…
tlambert | August 16, 2003Lott has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law: "Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive."
Lott implies that the law students were former deputies…
tlambert | August 14, 2003 Lott has a letter in the 26 July Columbus Dispatch replying to an earlier letter from Paul van Doorn. Lott repeats his claim from his 21 July letter: Yet, in the very same issue, another paper appeared by professors Plassmann and Whitley, who examined three additional years' worth of data and found "annual reductions in murder rates between 1.5 and 2.3 percent for each additional year that a right-to-carry law is in effect. The total benefit from reduced crimes usually ranges between about $2 billion and $3 billion per year."
Once more he pretends that he never miscoded his data…
tlambert | August 12, 2003 Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com has a fourth story about the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org. Johnson discusses the evidence that Jonah Peretti is involved with the site and quotes Lott:
"I don't see how one can get around that [Peretti] either is running it, or he knows in detail exactly what's happening with the website"
... Lott notes that, while the creator of the site now claims to have "regained control" of it from the hacker, the e-mail address the hacker posted on the site is still active and auto-replying to messages from the Contagiousmedia.org…
tlambert | August 11, 2003 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…