tlambert | June 19, 2003Tom Maguire has an interesting post which collects some links to blogspace discussion about the Appalachian Law School shootings.
One interesting thing is that Lott and Kopel independently made the same error---they both claimed that the New York Times did not mention the defender's gun when it did. Both errors were particularly egregious. Kopel quoted a sentence from the article but did not notice that the gun was mentioned in the very next sentence. Lott counted the New York Times story as one of the four that mentioned the gun, but also claimed that…
tlambert | June 18, 2003Tom Spencer believes that I have essentially destroyed one of Lott's core arguments and wonders why pro-gun people continue to support him.
There are two contradictory stories about what happened at the Appalachian Law School:
Besen said that Odighizuwa set his gun and a clip on a light fixture about four feet off the ground before Bridges arrived.
Bridges said that he aimed his gun at Odighizuwa and then Odighizuwa "throwed his weapon down". Note that they contradict each other about what Odighizuwa did with his gun. If Besen is correct and Bridges arrived after Odighizuwa…
tlambert | June 17, 2003The centrepiece of Lott's The Bias Against Guns is the story he tells about the shootings at the Appalachian Law School. According to Lott, after killing three people Peter Odighizuwa was almost out of ammunition and was on his way to his car to get more when he was confronted by two armed students, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. When Bridges aimed his gun at Odighizuwa Odighizuwa dropped his gun and was tackled by students. Lott opines that Bridges and Gross "undoubtedly saved many lives". Lott says that the biased media mostly suppressed this story, with…
tlambert | June 16, 2003Lott has an update to his 6/13/03 post where he responds to this post. He writes: An e-mailer asks about whether the Ayres and Donohue piece in the American Law and Economics Review was refereed. While the original papers in that journal are indeed refereed, their piece was a review article and my understanding from Ayres was that it was not refereed.
It seems that Lott is unable to admit to even the smallest error. He claimed that they had not published it in a refereed journal, when in fact they had. Instead of admitting to the error he pretends that…
tlambert | June 15, 2003Earlier I observed that Lott had claimed that a paper by Cummings et al that found a significant decline in juvenile accidental gun deaths following the introduction of safe storage laws was widely discredited because the researchers never factored in that accidental gun deaths have been falling everywhere for decades.
When I pointed out that their paper clearly stated that they had controlled for national trends by using fixed effects, Lott responded with: We had been unable to replicate their claimed results using fixed effects and the only way we could get…
tlambert | June 13, 2003Lott's 6/13/03 entry on his blog links to a letter from David Mayer printed in the Columbus Dispatch replying to a letter from Donohue. Mayer asserts: The recent letter by Stanford law professor John Donohue (June 7) nicely illustrates the propensity of gun-control advocates to play games with statistics and to engage in ad hominem attacks. In this case, Professor Donohue unfairly attacks economist John Lott, whose research has helped dispel the myths about guns that anti-gun fanatics continue to propagate.
Apparently Mayer is unaware what an ad hominem…
tlambert | June 13, 2003Lott has an interview on strike-the-root.com. He repeats some of the false claims discussed here earlier, such as his claim of a 440% increase in handgun crime in Sydney. He also claims: Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.
It is appalling that rather than admit to being wrong, Lott continues to spread false information about what works when defending yourself with a gun. Thiscould actually endanger people's lives by giving them false impressions about what works and what doesn't work. John Lott, on radio…
tlambert | June 11, 2003In his 6/9/03 posting, Lott claims that Donohue has made a "large number of easily identifiable mistakes". Even if true, such mistakes pale into insignificance compared with the coding errors that Lott made but will not admit to, but let's examine Lott's claims and see how many mistakes he has successfully identified: he implies that David Olson's paper was so flawed that Olson and Maltz had to withdraw the paper.
Lott has correctly identified a slip up by Donohue, since the paper has not been withdrawn. I checked with Donohue and he informs me that what he…
tlambert | June 10, 2003I asked Ben Horwich, the president of volume 55 of the Stanford Law Review to comment on Lott's latest complaints. He writes:
I did not categorically promise Lott that we'd run a verbatim statement by Plassmann and Whitley. I did express my interest in working with them to clear up the confusion. I think that's the crux of the misunderstanding.
The statement that did run was prepared in consultation with Plassmann and Whitley; indeed, they provided the original draft. Of course, it's modified a great deal from that version, but I wanted to print something that I stood behind…
tlambert | June 9, 2003Lott has a new posting where he has some more about the important matter of the coding errors in his data. Sandwiched between some more complaints about unfair the Stanford Law Review has been and some imaginary errors in Ayres and Donohue, we have: Of course, this is nothing new with their misleading attacks on David Mustard, where minor coding errors did not change what he had written. (Instead of letting David correct a small mistake which did not fundamentally change the results, David was forced to cut out what would have been a damaging evidence…
tlambert | June 8, 2003 This is one of the graphs that Lott presented to the National Academy of Sciences Panel in 2002. David Mustard's originally included it in his contribution to Evaluating Gun Policy, but it was removed after Donohue showed him that it was the product of coding errors made by Lott. Later graphs produced by Lott look quite different---as we saw yesterday, this seems to be all the acknowledgment you get from Lott when he makes an error.
Notice how the graph shows crime rates falling sharply and immediately after carry laws were adopted. These results were much…
tlambert | June 8, 2003Tom Spencer thinks that the latest information on David Gross might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
tlambert | June 7, 2003Lott has a new posting where he responds to a letter from John Donohue to the Columbus Dispatch replying to a Lott op-ed. I earlier posted a link to the op-ed and a letter from Michael Maltz replying to it.
I'll post more on Lott's comments later, but for now I want to point to the most important thing in his posting: see also the data and updated results available at www.johnlott.org.
"Updated results?" If you go to his site you will find corrected versions of the graphs and tables that Ayres and Donohue said were incorrect because of coding errors. The most interesting of…
tlambert | June 6, 2003Lott's comments about Australia that I discussed yesterday follow a similar pattern to those of many American pro-gunners. First, they greatly exaggerate the restrictions introduced in 1996, claiming that Australia "banned guns" or, in Lott's case claiming that Australia banned "most guns and [made] it a crime to use a gun defensively." In fact, semi-automatic long guns were banned and there was no change in the law on self-defence. Next, the pro-gunners will assert or imply that Australians were made defenceless. In fact, the new laws made very little…
tlambert | June 5, 2003Lott has a new entry on his blog. First, he approvingly links to an NRO opinion piece by John Derbyshire, who writes about the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murdering a 16-year old burglar. Derbyshire feels that Martin's imprisonment is "preposterous". Glenn Reynolds, in a rather overwrought column goes further, declaring Martin to be a "political prisoner" and wants Amnesty International to weigh in. Unfortunately, Reynolds and Derbyshire have uncritically accepted the Martin's defense lawyers version of the events, apparently without checking…
tlambert | June 5, 2003In The Latest Misfires in Support of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis Ayres and Donohue write:In the wake of some of the criticisms that we have leveled against the Lott and Mustard thesis, John Lott appeared before a National Academy of Sciences panel examining the plausibility of the more guns, less crime thesis and presented them with a series of figures showing year-by-year estimates that appeared to show sharp and immediate declines in crime with adoption of concealed-carry laws. David Mustard even included these graphs in his initial comment…
tlambert | June 5, 2003The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story about David Gross, who, after all this time, is the only witness to Lott's 1997 survey who has ever been found: A major player and legal consultant on Minnesota's new gun-permit law is a former board member of the National Rifle Association who was fired from the Minneapolis city attorney's office for opposing gun buy-back programs and carrying a gun to work.
He also acknowledges shooting a deer in his back yard in St. Louis Park with a .357-caliber Magnum handgun for eating his raspberries, pointing a rifle at a…
tlambert | June 3, 2003Lott has responded to parts of my post yesterday. 1) "Why do you use the government's survey estimate for the number of crimes committed with guns but use other surveys in your two books for estimates on the number of defensive gun uses?"
The problem with the survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics is that "virtually none of the victims who use guns defensively tell interviewers about it in the [National Crime Victimization Survey]" (Kleck, Targeting Guns, p. 2250. People aren't allowed to say whether they have used a gun defensively unless they…
tlambert | June 2, 2003Lott has posted a transcript of the AEI event to publicize The Bias Against Guns. I'll try to correct some of the false statements in the transcript: In 2001, according to government survey evidence, there were about 450,000 crimes that were committed with guns. Of those, there were about 8,000 gun murders. Yet our best estimates indicate that last year Americans also used guns defensively, a little bit over 2 million times a year. Ninety-five percent or so of the time, simply brandishing a gun was sufficient to stop an attack.
Surveys that ask about both…
tlambert | June 1, 2003In chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime Lott presents an analysis based on two exit polls of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purports to show that a 1% increase in a state's gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.
Lott's two polls indicate that gun ownership increased by a remarkable 50% in just eight years, from 26% to 39%. However, this is contradicted by all other surveys on gun ownership. The best of these are the GSS surveys which actually show a modest decline over that period.
Even Lott found a 50%…