tlambert | July 18, 2003On July 12 The Columbus Dispatch published a letter from Paul van Doorn replying to an earlier letter from David Mayer that I commented on. Here is an extract (hyperlinks added by me): Mayer claimed the research of economist John Lott establishes that "violent-crime rates fall after right-to-carry laws are adopted."
Lott is the darling of the pro-gun movement; he has written two books based upon studies he has conducted on crime rates and gun laws and frequently testifies before legislative bodies that statistical evidence establishes that laws permitting the carrying of concealed…
tlambert | July 15, 2003Lott has an op-ed in the Kansas City Star which is recycled from a previous op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch that I commented on here. He has made an interesting change---in earlier versions he wrote: Other research, by David Olson at Loyola University and Michael Maltz at the University of Illinois, found that when law-abiding citizens carried concealed handguns, criminals were much less likely to carry guns. In fact, they found gun murders fell by 20 percent.
This prompted a rebuke from Michael Maltz, who wrote: In an effort to promote laws permitting the carrying of…
tlambert | July 12, 2003A reader reminds me of another problem with Lott's attack on UN gun control efforts that I discussed yesterday. Lott argues that the UN's regulations would prevent people from obtaining small arms to resist totalitarian regimes. This is rather undercut by the Iraqi experience. Tim Noah observes that Iraqis seemed to have been well armed without ever overthrowing a repressive dictatorship. Also of interest are follow-up postings by Tim Noah and Jim Henley and the ensuing blogspace discussion ably covered by Henley here.
tlambert | July 11, 2003
This is an annotated list of John Lott's on line reviews at Amazon
and at Barnes and Noble.
Most of his reviews were posted anonymously or under a false name, and he used this anonymity to post many five-star reviews of his own books and to pan rival books.
When you post a review at Amazon.com, you can choose to post it
anonymously (in which case it is attributed to "A reader"), or under a
pseudonym that you choose. Lott posted some his reviews using
pseudonyms: maximcl and
href="#sherwinrl">sherwinrl, the names of two of his children andwashingtonian2 and
href="#maryrosh">…
tlambert | July 11, 2003I've switched from hand-crafted html to using Blosxom for my blog. This lets me add some nice features like grouping postings by topic, an RSS feed, comments, search and so on.
After a couple of hundred postings about John Lott, I also feel like posting on something else for a change, so it's now Tim Lambert's weblog rather than a weblog examining Lott's research. For readers who are just interested in that topic, you need to visit cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott and you'll only see the postings on Lott.
The old address (http://www.cse.unsw.…
tlambert | July 10, 2003In response to my comments about Potemra's review of The Bias Against Guns, Paul Blackman points out that Lott actually mentions the Second Amendment twice in his book. I've corrected my earlier posting to say "barely even mentions" instead of "never mentions".
The first mention is when Lott quotes Benjamin Civiletti: "The nation can no longer afford to let the gun lobby's distortion of the Constitution cripple every reasonable attempt to implement an effective national policy towards guns and crime."
Lott does not dispute Civiletti's interpretation of the Constitution…
tlambert | July 10, 2003In footnote 40 of his article The Impact of Concealed-Carry Laws (in Evaluating Gun Policy), John Donohue comments on Lott's claims about multiple-victim public shootings: In the wake of a recent school shooting in Germany that killed 14, Lott summarized his finding from the Lott and Landes study: "multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent in states that passed [right-to-carry] laws." John Lott, "Gun Control Misfires in Europe," Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2002, A16. Although the results may at first seem persuasive, there is a major…
tlambert | July 8, 2003In the July 14 issue of National Review Michael Potemra has a review of The Bias Against Guns. He writes:Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me---as for many others---it's the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most important which, at a particular time, is most under attack. And that's why John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute deserves the status of Hero of the Constitution in our time: He stands up for the embattled Second Amendment, the section of the Bill of Rights most hated…
tlambert | July 6, 2003skippy isn't impressed by Lott's sleight of hand in proving he had a disk crash instead of offering evidence that he did a survey. skippy is rightly skeptical about the existence of witnesses to the disk crash. There are none. However, we do have plenty of evidence that Lott lost data in 1997 and told lots of people at the time he had lost the data in a disk crash, so I'm prepared to let him have the disk crash.
tlambert | July 6, 2003Lott was on MSNBC's Buchanan & Press on May 26. From the transcript:
PRESS:
After that book came out, there was a person who showed up on the Internet by the name of Mary Rosh, who said you were the best professor she ever had in college. She praised the book in her review on the Internet. She said any critics of your book should slink away into a hole and hide. And it turns out this Mary Rosh is a total invention of yours.
Now, why should I believe anything you say in this book if you are lying to people on the Internet?
LOTT:
Well, first of all, not all of those were from me.
PRESS:…
tlambert | July 3, 2003Science has printed a letter from Lott (subscription required) responding to Science's editorial suggesting that the AEI should deal with Lott the same way that Emory dealt with Bellesiles: Donald Kennedy's editorial "Research fraud and public policy" (18 April, p. 393) alleges that I made up a computer hard disk crash when challenged about the loss of data on a 1997 survey. Unfortunately, Science did not contact me about these allegations. I have provided editors with statements from nine different academics, verifying the hard disk crash. Four of them were coauthors who also lost data with…
tlambert | July 2, 2003Jesse Taylor has written a letter to the editor about John Lott and also gives his take on John Lott's suggestion that Iraqi civilians should have more guns. Kaimipono is deeply skeptical. Bill Berkowitz describes it like this: Perhaps the weirdest bit of advice came from John Lott Jr., the now-discredited resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Lott, who believes the American people would be safer if we all are armed, suggested that trying to force Iraqis to turn in their guns was a mistake.
Also commenting on Lott's advice was Handgun-Free America Director Chris McGrath.…
tlambert | July 2, 2003 A deltoid is the concave triangular curve formed when a small circle rolls around the inside of a circle three times as big. Eric Weisstein's Mathworld has a nice animation as well as a description of its properties.
I use deltoids for the ends of the cartouches in the sidebar and the icon that marks the end of each post.
So why did I call this thing "deltoid"? Well, it's named after the computer I use to write these postings. How geeky is that? I name all my computers after plane curves (I have another one called 'cycloid'). My wife insisted on regular…
tlambert | June 30, 2003gzuckier explains, in detail, what is wrong with Lott's criticism of Kellermann.
For some reason, Kellermann's work seems to provoke badly flawed criticism. In another posting gzuckier demolishes three other critiques. In an earlier posting I noted that a critique by Kopel and Reynolds got all its facts wrong. And in a AEI event promoting Lott's new book, Carl Moody claimed: 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…
tlambert | June 29, 2003After I linked to a posting by Cypren that attacked Fox News, Lott read the posting, construed it as an attack on himself and complained about it. Cypren's post seemed to me to quite clearly be an attack on Fox rather than Lott, but I guess Lott's is so used to being attacked that he saw it as an attack on himself.
tlambert | June 26, 2003Terry Krepel writes about biased reporting from CNSNews.com. Krepel observes that their coverage of Lott exhibits bias by omission with two stories about Lott carefully avoiding mentioning the mysterious survey or Mary Rosh.
tlambert | June 25, 2003Lott 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…
tlambert | June 23, 2003Cypren criticizes Fox News for presenting this Lott op-ed as if it were a news story.
tlambert | June 22, 2003John Quiggin comments on this Gun Control Australia press release attacking John Whitley (see also Eugene Volokh's comments). Ditto on Quiggin's Voltaire/JS Mill allusions, but I think everybody is paying too much attention to this. I believe that they may have made their attack on academic freedom just to generate some publicity and controversy. You can read Whitley's response to them here---note that he ignores that part of the press release.
Quiggin also writes: Sadly for Whitley, I think anyone associated with John Lott is going to have a hard time getting ARC…