tlambert | May 31, 2003In his interview in the Illinois Leader Lott says:
"If you look at the national news reports for ABC, NBC and CBS during 2001, they had about 190,000 words of contemporaneous gun crimes stories on their television morning and evening news reports. The average story is only 250 words or so. During that whole year there was not one single mention of people using their guns defensively, to either protect themselves or someone else."
An alert reader points out that Lott seems to have missed this story:
Take, for example, the question of how often guns are used for self-…
tlambert | May 30, 2003Several people have commented on the irony of Lott attacking the New York Times for a "Pattern of Deceit", but let's look at what he says in his article:
As an example, take the major 20,000 word series on "rampage killings" the Times published during 2000.
The paper declared that the evidence they compiled "confirmed the public perception that they appear to be increasing." Indeed, the Times found that exactly 100 such attacks took place during the 50 years from 1949 to 1999, 51 of which occurred after the beginning of 1995. Their conclusion: "…
tlambert | May 30, 2003In Lott's latest entry he has given up trying to support his claim that
"the sensible girl ran for where the family guns were stored. But they were locked up tight."
and responded to this post, where I pointed out that Cummings et al clearly stated that they controlled for national trends, but Lott none the less dismisses their results, claiming that they did not control for national trends. Lott now writes:
We had been unable to replicate their claimed results using fixed effects and the only way we could get something similar was without fixed effects…
tlambert | May 30, 2003David Glenn's article on academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education mentions the role of blogs in the investigation of Lott's conduct.
William Sjostrom writes "Lott always releases his data." But Lott has not released the data for his 1997 survey.
tlambert | May 29, 2003Lott has blogged for the third time about the Merced murders:
Taken together, the different articles in these various posts indicate that the gun was locked; it was placed in a way that was not accessible by the children; both the father and the great-uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, believed that if the gun had been accessible children's lives would have been saved; and these moves were done because of fear of the California state law.
And for the third time he has neither supported nor admitted as false this claim from his new book:
"the sensible girl ran…
tlambert | May 28, 2003Tom Spencer mentions the Washington Post's criticism of Lott. ArchPundit finds Lott's criticism (in this interview)of poorly done gun control research ironic. Arie discovers the John Lott story.
tlambert | May 28, 2003Lott has a new entry on his blog where he posts a transcript from Fox News that apparently has the father of the murdered children saying:
"If a gun would have been here today, I'd have at least a daughter alive."
I was mistaken when I suggested that the quote was a fabrication. The quote implies that all his daughters were murdered when they weren't, but perhaps it didn't imply this in its original context.
In any case Lott has not responded to the rest of my post, instead concentrating on one minor point. In two blog postings now Lott has neither…
tlambert | May 27, 2003The Washington Post zings Lott for throwing stones at the New York Times from his glass house. Matt Welch also comments, while Greg Beato thinks that the New York Times has hit rock bottom when even John Lott is denigrating its integrity.
Andrew Chamberlain invites readers to join in an online debate about Lott and scholarly integrity.
Tom Spencer comments on the errors that Lott made on his blog.
tlambert | May 27, 2003The Fox News story that Lott cites contains some other falsehoods:
For several years, gun control advocates have been quoting a study that reached a very different conclusion. University of Washington doctors claimed that in a dozen states which had safe storage laws, 39 children's lives were saved.
But the study has been widely discredited because the researchers never factored in that accidental gun deaths have been falling everywhere for decades.
The author of the article does not say where he got the claim that the study was "widely discredited" because they didn't…
tlambert | May 27, 2003Lott has started a blog and responded to the questions I raised about his claims about the Merced pitchfork murders:
Fox News interviewed the father of the dead children and reported the following:
"Lott cited a Merced, Calif. family whose guns were put away because of the state's safe storage law. John Carpenter, who lost two children in an attack in 2000, said a gun would have stopped the man who broke into his home with a pitchfork. 'If a gun had been here, today I'd have at least a daughter alive,' Carpenter said."
It doesn't appear that Fox News interviewed the father at…
tlambert | May 26, 2003Also in the Fox News article we have:
But Lott counters that the number of gun accidents among law-abiding citizens is remarkably low given that about 90 million Americans own firearms.
As I explained earlier, Lott's estimate of the number of firearm owners is much too high because he misunderstood the question in the poll that he used for his estimate.
tlambert | May 26, 2003Jan Haugland writes about how blogs have been bad news for people named Lott:
Even if Lott is not an outright fraud (which the evidence so far suggests he is), he is certainly not a scholar, and he is a using unethical methods and sloppy research.
Also commenting on blogs and Lott are Greg Vassie and Dan Gillmor.
tlambert | May 26, 2003I found a copy of the Fresno Bee story that Lott claimed
"included the fact that while he was breaking in the eldest child, a fourteen year old girl with experience in target shooting, went to her parents' bedroom, got out their handgun---and was unable to use it because of the trigger lock that her father had put on in obedience to a recent state law."
Of course it doesn't include that "fact", which would appear to be a fabrication.
tlambert | May 24, 2003Dr Limerick thinks Lott isn't washed up, because the AEI and similar institutions will always have a place for him.
Andrew Chamberlain tells us why character matters:
By Lott's total disregard for norms of honesty, he's revealed a deep character flaw that runs to his core. And people always become what they have in their core.
I keep having conversations where people argue the Mary Rosh scandal has no impact on Lott's scholarship. This is absurd. The scandal demonstrates that Lott is a man with no integrity or respect for the truth. Like it or not, this casts doubt on all his work,…
tlambert | May 23, 2003Tom Spencer finds Lott's complaints about a "pattern of deceit" at theNew York Times rather hilarious.
tlambert | May 23, 2003In chapter 7 of The Bias Against Guns, where Lott argues that "safe storage" laws cause increases in violent crime, he quotes from an op-ed:
Jessica Lynne Carpenter is 14 years old. She knows how to shoot ... Under the new "safe storage" laws being enacted in California and elsewhere, parents can be held criminally liable unless they lock up their guns when their children are home alone ... so that's just what law-abiding parents John and Tephanie Carpenter had done.... [The killer], who was armed with a pitchfork ... had apparently cut the phone lines. So when he forced his way into…
tlambert | May 22, 2003 Lott has written an op-ed where he criticizes the New York Times for a "pattern of deceit".
tlambert | May 21, 2003 Posts by d-squared and John Quiggin on data mining and Lott reminded me that Lott accused his critics of data mining in a response to Webster:
The Black and Nagin paper excludes Florida after they have already excluded the 86 percent of the counties with populations fewer than 100,000. Eliminating Florida as well as counties with fewer than 100,0000 does eliminate the significance in the one particular type of specification that they report for a couple of crimes, but the vast majority of estimates were unaffected from this extreme data mining and…