tlambert | January 18, 2003Steve Verdon has responded to my critique of More Guns, Less Crime.
Verdon starts by claiming that Lott's argument doesn't depend on their being more guns or less crime. He argues that you just need "more people carrying (concealed) existing guns legally" and that Lott found a substitution from violent crime to property crime rather than "less crime". Verdon then accuses me of being "extremely dishonest" for stating that Lott is arguing that more guns cause less crime. I find his accusation very strange. If, in a book entitled More Guns, Less Crime…
tlambert | January 18, 2003Lindgren has released a new version of his report. It's long, but it's an absolute must read. If you've read the earlier version, you can skip to section 4 to read Lindgren's description of how Lott is trying to change his story.
The disgraceful way that Lott has behaved towards Lindgren fits into the pattern of behaviour he has displayed---Lott absolutely can not, will not admit to making a mistake. If he wanted to change his story about the Chicago students, all he had to do was say "Did I say they were all from U of Chicago? Oops. That's not what I meant to say. I…
tlambert | January 17, 2003Julian Sanchez finds evidence that Lott lost data because of a computer crash. I'm afraid that he hasn't discovered anything new---his time would have been better spent reading Lindgren's report:
"I talked with one of Lott's co-authors on another paper, Bill Landes, and received emails from David Mustard, another co-author, and Gregory Huck, Lott's editor at the time at the University of Chicago Press. With varying degrees of certainty, all give circumstantial support to Lott's story of a sudden loss of data and text on projects, requiring delays and regeneration of work."
Marie…
tlambert | January 16, 2003Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me these comments, which draw attention to a key point that almost all bloggers have missed:
"There are two distinct issues in this case.
Lott repeatedly made erroneous statements about the findings of other researchers. None of the national surveys that he cited by name actually had any figure at all for merely brandishing or firing. One of them, the Roper survey (which was mentioned in the Feb. 6, 1997, Nebraska testimony) never even did any survey on defensive gun use. Of the polls that did collect data on firing, none of them obtained a figure anywhere…
tlambert | January 16, 2003Jim Henley gets another email from Lott. It's not fair!
Roger Ailes asks "how reliable is a self-reporting survey of 'defensive gun use' in the first place?". You're opening a real can of worms here, Roger. Survey estimates of the frequency of defensive gun use range from 80,000 (NCVS 87-92) to 23,000,000 (NSPOF). There is heated debate in the criminology literature as to what the correct number is. You can, for example, read Hemenway ("100,000 DGUs"), Kleck ("2.5 million DGUs"), Smith ("both sides are wrong") or my own endless writings on this topic. However, despite such huge…
tlambert | January 15, 2003Steve Verdon comments on the Ayres and Donahue study I cited yesterday. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have understood what their conclusions were. Try reading the abstract, Steve:
"Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade."
Now this study is correlational, so it certainly doesn't prove that carry laws…
tlambert | January 15, 2003 I want to comment further on the email Lott sent to some bloggers. Lott states that he has been responsive and implies that he was somehow ambushed on this issue.
Duncan first asked Lott for evidence for his survey last June. Lott did not respond. I sent him the first version of my report last September, and regularly sent him updates. He has not responded to any of them. I've tried my best to be open, while Lott has acted like someone with something to hide. For example, this new survey was done months ago, but Lott kept it secret until Dec 26. The results…
tlambert | January 14, 2003Mark Kleiman has an insightful post that is definitely worth reading. Mark observes that even though Lott's work on concealed carry laws does not rely on his alleged survey, destroying his credibility means that people cannot trust the results of his concealed carry laws. Actually, there is actually no reason to trust the results of his research on concealed carry laws in any case, since it has been superseded by the work of Ayres and Donahue who repeated it using more data and better models:
"Those who were swayed by the statistical evidence…
tlambert | January 14, 2003Jim Henley has an excellent blog roundup with thoughtful comments and even ratings.
Julian Sanchez has an update where he includes a comment from an economic researcher that repeats what I wrote below: if his new survey only has 13 defensive gun uses, then this sample is far too small to say anything useful about the frequency with which defenders shoot, and certainly can't be regarded as "confirming" the alleged 1997 survey.
Thomas Spencer has a post that is critical of some of the folks who were all over Bellesiles for downplaying Lott's sins.
Marie Gryphon (who…
tlambert | January 14, 2003In Lott's latest response, he changes his story again. He originally told Lindgren that hadn't discussed the survey with anyone at the time. Now he has recalled the name of an economist he discussed it with at the time. Unfortunately, when Julian Sanchez contacted this economist, he was unable to recall those discussions. He also originally told Lindgren that the survey was conducted by "several University of Chicago undergraduate volunteers" (a survey of the size he claims to have conducted would have required at least ten students, and…
tlambert | January 13, 2003John Lott has emailed Jim Henley with another response to Lindgren's report. I'll comment on this below. Julian Sanchez also got the Lott email. I didn't.
Comments from Jesse Walker at reason.com, skippy, Guy Cabot, Kevin Drum and Steve Verdon. Brief mentions by Iain Murray, Charles Murtaugh, Tapped, John Quiggin, Natalie Solent, Gene Hoffman, Jr., jeff and Bruce R.
tlambert | January 13, 2003Lindgren has updated his report. Main changes are the inclusion of a reply from John Lott and a dissection of Lott's new "Did I say three months? I meant one month. Yeah, that's the ticket!" claim.
Lots more people have blogged on this: Glenn Reynolds, Pejman Yousefzadeh, skippy, Ken Parish, Roger Ailes (twice), Atrios and Guy Cabot. And Marie Gryphon, Julian Sanchez, Jane Galt, Kevin Drum and Thomas M. Spencer have updates or new comments.
Glenn Reynolds and Thomas Spencer mention Bellesiles, but from opposite sides. Glenn states that "Lott's critics want, rather too…
tlambert | January 12, 2003After discussion has simmered along via email, Usenet and mailing list, Marie Gryphon has posted a nice summary on her blog.
Several blogs have picked up on this: Julian Sanchez, Jim Henley, Jane Galt, Kevin Drum and Thomas M. Spencer.
Clayton Cramer has posted a letter from John Lott on his blog. Some highlights:
"The overwhelming majority of the survey work was done at the beginning of the period over which the survey was done. It has obviously been a while, but my recollection is that the small number of people surveyed after the first four or five weeks (mainly…
tlambert | October 23, 2002 Joyce Lee Malcolm has an article in Reason online entitled Gun Control's Twisted Outcome. In that article she claims
"And in the four years from 1997 to 2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled."
and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control.
However if you look at the official English crime statistics: Crime in England and Wales 2001/2002 and go to the section on violent crime you will find the following:
"Estimates from the BCS reveal large and consistent falls in violent crime overall since 1995."
"Longer-term trends in violence…
tlambert | October 22, 2002Joyce Lee Malcolm's article in Reason online is
here
In that article she claims that "And in the four years from 1997 to
2001, the rate of violent crime [in England] more than doubled."
and asserts that this increase was caused by British gun control.
It took me less than five minutes to find the official English crime
statistics.
Going to the section on violent crime I find the following:
"Estimates from the BCS reveal large and consistent falls in violent
crime overall since 1995."
"Longer-term trends in violence overall continue to show significant
declines. Comparison of results…
tlambert | October 17, 2002compiled by Otis Dudley Duncan and Tim Lambert revised 23 Oct 2005 by Tim Lambert
Note: With the exception of academic publications, some tapes and some found by LexisNexis search, these were found on the Internet. The web is, of course, not perfectly reliable, and items appearing there can later disappear. This approximately chronological listing is probably incomplete, and we welcome additions and corrections.
This page documents how often Lott has made the false claim that 98% of with-gun defences involve merely brandishing the gun. A summary and the latest update on…
tlambert | October 17, 2002Lott's reply to Duncan's article raises some disturbing questions about Lott's honesty. See also James Lindgren's report on his attempt to find some evidence that Lott actually conducted a DGU survey.
Where did that 98 percent come from?
98 percent claims before 1997
Way back in 1993 in talk.politics.guns, C. D. Tavares wrote:
The answer is that the gun never needs to be fired in 98% of the instances of a successful self-defense with a gun. The criminals just leave abruptly, instead."
When I queried him about this, he quickly corrected his error:
Kleck says in the magazine "…
tlambert | October 6, 2002 [On Oct 7 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof and emailed it to Lott.]
However, that isn't what I was referring to when I wrote "mathematically impossible". Lott often goes on to claim that 3/4 of the times the DG User fires the shots are warning shots, that only 0.5% of DG uses involve a shot fired at the offender. Kleck's survey turned up about 200 incidents. Since Lott's survey had half the sample size of Kleck's, the most he could expect to find would be 100 incidents (slightly less if you allow for the slightly lower DGU incidence he found). 0.5% of 100 is 0.5. It is…
tlambert | October 2, 2002 [On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.]
Glenn Reynolds writes:
I agree that Mr. Lambert's "payback for Bellesiles" angle is pretty obvious.
Your allegation is false.
I also note that Lott isn't accused of publishing fraudulent scholarship, but rather of making public statements that appear to be obviously true, but for which he has not published research as a backup.
Are you actually asserting that it is "obviously true" that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack"? That's the claim that…