tlambert | May 19, 2003Tom Spencer comments on Lott's attack on Tom Smith. John Quiggin writes about data mining and Lott.
tlambert | May 19, 2003Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com describes an AEI event to publicise The Bias Against Guns. Lott repeats his version of the Appalachian Law School shootings, as usual not mentioning that the shooting stopped because the shooter ran out of ammunition and not mentioning that the armed students were off-duty police officers.
Lott also attacked University of Chicago professor Mark Duggan who published a paper, "More Guns, More Crime" in the Journal of Political Economy (CIX p 1086-1114): He pointed to a recent paper that used subscription to the third-most…
tlambert | May 18, 2003On pages 36-37 of The Bias Against Guns Lott attacks Tom Smith: A few years ago, while I was doing research at the University of Chicago,I had lunch with Tom Smith, who is the director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). This private organization conducts many important national surveys for the government as well as other clients. During lunch Tom mentioned how important he thought the General Social Survey was. He felt the large drop in gun ownership implied by his survey would "make it easier for politicians to do the right…
tlambert | May 18, 2003Jim Henley is still concerned about the possibility that the BCS figures might be cooked. I still consider this possibility extremely unlikely because it would require some sort of conspiracy between the statisticians (who don't have an interest in crime figures showing some particular result) and the top level people (who do have such an interest). With this many people involved, it would be quite likely that someone who blow the whistle and a major scandal would result. Also, if they were cooking the figures, they would have cooked the police statistics as well. (Recall that…
tlambert | May 15, 2003ArchPundit has a thoughtful analysis of the latest from Reynolds and Lott.
Shorter dsquared: If you use some data to construct a model, then to test it properly you need new data. Lott's approach is a little different. The model that was given greatest prominence in the original Lott and Mustard paper (the results of this model where given in the abstract and whenever Lott summarized his paper) showed that there was a 3.5% decline in the violent crime rate associated with the carry laws. In the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime Lott…
tlambert | May 15, 2003Lott has an op-ed in The Plain Dealer where he continues to mislead: My new book, "The Bias Against Guns," examines multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and finds 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.
Lott does not mention here, or in his new book, this paper: Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, "The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings" Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp 271…
tlambert | May 14, 2003Tom Spencer thinks that Reynolds is "making wild evidence-free claims about the nature of other scholarship in the field just to distract you from the trouble his man Lott is in." It is certainly odd that Reynolds doesn't provide any evidence that the research he criticizes is "utter bilge" while insisting that criticism of Lott is"best done by those who ... have done actual work, and have actual evidence relevant to the matter at hand.
tlambert | May 14, 2003In Lott's appearance on KSFO he talked about the Appalachian Law School shooting and described the two armed off-duty police officers who apprehended the shooter as "two students, one with a former law enforcement background". Lott knows full well (as this thread demonstrates) that both of them were current police officers. And they didn't stop the shooting---the shooter had run out of ammunition.
Lott also claimed that British gun control in the 20s, 50s and 90s was followed by an increase in crime in each case. I have data for homicide from 1857…
tlambert | May 13, 2003Glenn Reynolds comments on the CNSNews article. Despite Ayres and Donohue's best efforts, Reynolds is all agnostic on the Lott question, but fortunately he has an opinion on the study by Ludwig and Cook (who Reynolds calls "antigun researchers"): What's most striking to me, though, is another study, by antigun researchers, that tries to measure gun ownership by suicide rates. (And it's not mentioned here, but I believe there was another that tried to use subscriptions to gun magazines as a proxy.) This seems rather bogus to me, and I can only imagine the general derision if this…
tlambert | May 13, 2003Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com writes a very pro-Lott piece on the dispute between Lott and Ayres and Donohue. Probably the most notable feature is what is not mentioned---there is nothing about the coding errors Lott made. We can be sure that Donohue mentioned the problem to Johnson, but Lott had nothing to say on the matter and Johnson chose not to mention it. [Update: I checked with Donohue and he told me that he didn't get to mentioning the coding errors. My mistake. It is still true that Lott did not use this chance to dispute the allegation of…
tlambert | May 13, 2003[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on May 13, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
With some recent attacks on me in a variety of places from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to numerous other places, I thought that I should send out some responses for those who might be interested.
A) There have been many claims that I didn't conduct a survey in 1997 that was reported in one sentence on page 3 of my book, More Guns, Less Crime. In the attached MSWord file, I present the complete statements…
tlambert | May 13, 2003As well as making the highly misleading claim that women are 2.5 times as likely to be injured if they offer no resistance than resisting with a gun as I discussed yesterday, in The Bias Against Guns Lott claims (page 99): Carrying a gun is also the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.6
Endnote 6 states: Gary Kleck and Don Kates (288-290) present the most recent data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 1998 and also indicate that the risk of serious injury from a criminal attack is…
tlambert | May 12, 2003So, apart from pretending to be one, what expertise does Lott have on women and gun issues? Well, he wrote this NRO article on women and guns. It was widely linked by bloggers, who felt that the key statistic was this: "The probability of serious injury from a criminal confrontation is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than resisting with a gun."
Lott makes the same claim in More Guns, Less Crime, in The Bias Against Guns and in op-eds and speeches and on radio and TV shows. Along with the "98% brandishing" it is one of his favourite…
tlambert | May 9, 2003The Journalist's Guide to Gun Policy Scholars and Second Amendment Scholars is a directory of pro-gun scholars. It is grouped into sections by specialty. So who are the experts with special expertise in Women and Gun Issues?Women and Gun IssuesDr. John Lott
American Enterprise InstituteDr. Helen Smith
Southeastern Psych. Servs.Prof. Mary Zeiss Stange
Skidmore CollegeProf. Carol Oyster
U. of Wisconsin Psych.
tlambert | May 8, 2003Three recent papers that contradict Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" theory:
Duwe, Kovandzic and Moody, "The Impact of Right-to-Carry Concealed Firearm Laws on Mass Public Shootings" Homicide Studies Journal, 6:4 pp 271-296 (2002). Duwe et al find no statistically significant impact of carry laws on mass public shootings, contradicting Lott's claims in his new book and an earlier paper with Landes. (Lott does not even mention this paper in his book.) Even when they tried to replicate Lott's results they could not find a significant effect.
Helland and Tabarrok in Using…
tlambert | May 7, 2003Mark Kleiman has posted some comments from John Donohue about the Stanford Law Review controversy. Donohue isn't even sure what the changed word was that caused Lott to withdraw his name. (Details are here if you are interested.) And like the rest of us, Donohue is puzzled as to why Lott has no direct response to the serious allegation of coding errors.
I also have some comments from Donohue responding to claims in Lott's The Bias Against Guns. Donohue writes: The figures on pages 237-239 of Lott's new book are the same as Figures 4a-4f in the LPW reply…
tlambert | May 6, 2003So what was the one word correction that prompted Lott to remove his name from his paper? In their draft, Ayres and Donohue wrote (my emphasis): On the other hand, the temporal pattern, that states adopting shall-issue laws in the late 1980s did better while those adopting in the 1990s did worse, may simply reflect the influence of a time-varying factor (the crack trade?) that caused sharp rises in crime for many states in the late 1980s, and then greater-than-average price declines in the 1990s.
Now the word "price" here makes…
tlambert | May 6, 2003Julian Sanchez has an article in the May issue of Reason on the role blogs played in the investigation of the Lott affair.